“No friends of any kind?” I shook my head. “H’m,” he said. He had a wart growing on one side of his nose where it joined the cheek. I found myself studying it intently; it was a most interesting wart, whitish, but a little flushed on its upper surface. It looked like a small unripe cherry. “Do you like cherries?” I asked. The doctor seemed rather surprised. “Yes,” he said, after a moment’s silence and with great deliberation, as though he had been carefully weighing the matter in his mind. “So do I.” And I burst out laughing. This time, however, my breathing triumphantly stood the strain. “So do I. But not unripe ones,” I added, gasping with mirth. It seemed to me that nothing funnier had ever been said. And then Mrs. Aldwinkle stepped definitely into my life. For, looking round, still heaving with the after-swell of my storm of laughter, I suddenly saw the Chinese lantern lady of the _patino_ standing before me. Her flame-coloured costume, a little less radiant now that it was wet, still shone among the aquarium shadow of her green parasol, and her face looked as though it were she who had been drowned, not I. “They tell me that you’re an Englishman,” she said in the same ill-controlled, unmusical voice I had heard, not long since, misquoting Shelley. Still tipsy, still light-headed with convalescence, I laughingly admitted it. “I hear you were nearly drowned.” “Quite right,” I said, still laughing; it was such a marvellous joke. “I’m most sorry to hear....” She had a way of leaving her sentences unfinished. The words would tail off into a dim inarticulate blur of sound. “Don’t mention it,” I begged her. “It isn’t at all disagreeable, you know. Afterwards, at any rate....” I stared at her affectionately and with my convalescent’s boundless curiosity. She stared back at me. Her eyes, I thought, must have the same bulge as those little red lenses one screws to the rear forks of bicycles; they collected all the light diffused around them and reflected it again with a concentrated glitter. “I came to ask whether I could be of any assistance,” said the Chinese lantern lady. “Most kind.” “You’re alone here?” “Quite, for the present.” “Then perhaps you might care to come and stay a night or two at my house, until you’re entirely....” She mumbled, made a gesture that implied the missing word and went on. “I have a house over there.” She waved her hand in the direction of the mountainous section of the Shelleian landscape. Gleefully, in my tipsy mood, I accepted her invitation. “Too delightful,” I said. Everything, this morning, was too delightful. I should have accepted with genuine, unmixed pleasure an invitation to stay with Miss Carruthers or Mr. Brimstone. “And your name?” she asked. “I don’t know that yet.” “Chelifer.” “Chelifer? Not Francis Chelifer?” “Francis Chelifer,” I affirmed. “Francis Chelifer!” Positively, her soul was in my name. “But how _won_derful! I’ve wanted to meet you for years.”