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(Miss Truebody wore white locknit nightdresses, sprigged with posies), and got her into bed. It was difficult to make out how much she understood of her situation. Troy wondered if it was the injection of morphine or her condition or her normal habit of mind or all three, that made her so confused and vague. When she settled in bed she began to talk with hectic fluency about herself. It was difficult to understand her as she had frantically waved away the offer of her false teeth. Her father, it seemed, had been a doctor, a widower, living in the Bermudas. She was his only child and had spent her life with him until, a year ago, he had died, leaving her, as she put it, quite comfortably though not well off. She had decided that she could just afford a trip to England and the continent. Her father, she muttered distractedly, had “not kept up,” had “lost touch.” There had been an unhappy break in the past, she believed, and their relations were never mentioned. Of course there were friends in the Bermudas but not, it appeared, very many or very intimate friends. She rambled on for a little while, continually losing the thread of her narrative and frowning incomprehensibly at nothing. The pupils of her eyes were contracted and her vision seemed to be confused. Presently her voice died away and she dozed uneasily.
    Troy stole out and returned to the hall. Alleyn, Ricky and Saradi had gone, but the butler was waiting for her and showed her up the steep flight of stairs in the wall. It seemed to turn about a tower and they passed two landings with doors leading off them. Finally the man opened a larger and heavier door and Troy was out in the glare of full morning on a canopied roofgarden hung, as it seemed, in blue space where sky and sea met in a wide crescent. Not till she advanced some way towards the balustrade did Cap St. Gilles appear, a sliver of earth pointing south.
    Alleyn and Baradi rose from a breakfast-table near the balustrade. Ricky lay, fast asleep, in a suspended seat under a gay canopy. The smell of freshly ground coffee and of
brioches
and
croissants
reminded Troy that she was hungry.
    They sat at the table. It was long, spread with a white cloth and set for a number of places. Troy was foolishly reminded of the Mad Hatter’s Tea-party. She looked over the parapet and saw the railroad about eighty feet below her and perhaps a hundred feet from the base of the Chèvre d’Argent. The walls, buttressed and pierced with windows, fell away beneath her in a sickening perspective. Troy had a hatred of heights and drew back quickly. “Last night,” she thought, “I looked into one of those windows.”
    Dr. Baradi was assiduous in his attentions and plied her with coffee. He gazed upon her remorselessly and she sensed Alleyn’s annoyance rising with her own embarrassment. For a moment she felt weakly inclined to giggle.
    Alleyn said: “See here, darling, Dr. Baradi thinks that Miss Truebody is extremely ill, dangerously so. He thinks we should let her people know at once.”
    “She has no people. She’s only got acquaintances in the Bermudas; I asked. There seems to be nobody at all.”
    Baradi said: “In that case…” and moved his head from side to side. He turned to Troy and parodied helplessness with his hands. “So in that direction, we can do nothing.”
    “The next thing,” Alleyn said, speaking directly to his wife, “is the business of giving an anaesthetic. We could telephone to a hospital in St. Christophe and try to get someone, but there’s this medical jamboree and in any case it’ll mean a delay of some hours. Or Dr. Baradi can try to get his own anaesthetist to fly from Paris to the nearest airport. More delay and considerable expense. The other way is for me to have a shot at it. Should we take the risk?”
    “What,” Troy asked, making herself look at him, “do you think, Dr. Baradi?”
    He sat near and a little behind her on the balustrade. His thighs bulged in their