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another reminder from Irene that the wretched man knew me even if I did not know him. Our buxom maid appeared in the hallway.
    “You need help?” Godfrey asked in rapid French that I had only lately begun to follow well. “André has gone for Dr. Mersenné in the village.”
    “Non, Monsieur,” Sophie replied, adding—if I understood her correctly—that Madame Norton was having no difficulty disrobing the man!
    I turned on Godfrey like an angry goose, so furious I could only hiss my disbelief.
    “No, no, Nell. André and I disrobed him for bed. Irene is merely searching his clothing for clues.”
    “Worse! They might be disease-ridden, vermin-infested—”
    “Decently clean, if a bit worn,” came Irene’s cheery overriding tones from the foot of the stairs. She entered the parlor, her eyes belladonna-bright, though curiosity was her only cosmetic.
    “Such a puzzle,” she added happily, perching on the arm of Godfrey’s chintz-upholstered easy chair. “His Eastern outer clothing hides European underwear and his body is sun-browned to the waist, yet his legs are as white as a fish belly.”
    “Irene!” I remonstrated faintly.
    “I am sorry, Nell.” Irene sounded genuinely contrite for once. “I should not have said anything so forward as ‘fish belly.’ “
    “You are having fun with me. At least until now your interest in the condition of strange gentlemen’s bodies had confined itself to corpses.”
    “We may have one on our hands yet,” Godfrey put in a trifle grimly.
    “This man may... die?”
    “But you must not worry, Nell,” Irene said. “You do not know him.”
    “That does not mean I wish him to die, disreputable as he is. He may have had a tragic life... have been cast out while a child. He may have contracted a dreadful malady in far-off China while ministering to the heathens.”
    “Nell is right in one thing,” Godfrey told Irene. “It has the look of a foreign fever. Dr. Mersenné may know what, I hope.”
    Irene nodded, equally grave. “I also hope Dr. Mersenné can diagnose the large puncture wound in his upper right arm.”
    “The bite of some huge, exotic foreign spider,” I suggested.
    “More like the injection of some huge, exotic needle,” she returned.
    “A needle? You mean a syringe? Then he has already seen a doctor.”
    Irene leaned over and lifted my barely touched glass of sherry from the marquetry table upon which it sat. “I do not think so.” She sipped consideringly. “I believe we may have a mortally ill man upon our hands, and one so recently stricken that he did not yet know it himself.”
    “How recently?” I asked, puzzled.
    “Even as he paused to observe us outside the café. In fact, I believe that he has ‘fallen ill’ because he recognized someone.”
    “Some... one?”
    Irene toasted me with my own glass. “You, my dear Nell. I must congratulate you: you have led a most delicious and likely dangerous mystery straight to my doorstep.”
    She eyed Godfrey with rather ferocious jubilation. “To our doorstep, my dears. Now we must keep our guest alive so we can learn who is trying to kill him, and why.  
    “And we must discover why our formidable documenter Nell does not recall a man who remembers her so vividly that the passage of years and a major dislocation in place does not deceive him even on the brink of physical collapse.”
    “He is not in the least respectable,” I protested in explanation of why I should not be expected to recognize such a man.
    “That,” said Irene severely, “is no excuse.”
     

 
    Chapter Six
    A POISONOUS PAST
     
    The cottage at Neuilly was becoming a routine rest-stop for wayfaring strangers.
    I watched from the front parlor that afternoon as Dr. Mersenné arrived in an officious hush and was rapidly ushered upstairs. I was reminded of Louise Montpensier’s arrival on the premises just last autumn: disheveled, wet, hysterical and freshly tattooed.
    In Louise’s case, there was the evidence of