‘You are a bad sleeper?’ I said, in a tone that proclaimed at once that I was a bad sleeper also.

‘Yes,’ said he, ’and so are you, as I noticed the other night.  I can always tell.  There is something in the eyes when a man is a bad sleeper that proclaims it to me.’

Then springing up from the divan and laying his hand upon my shoulder, he said, ’And you have a great trouble at the heart.  You have had some great loss the effect of which is sapping the very fountains of your life.  We should be friends.  We must be friends.  I asked you to call upon me because we must be friends.’

His voice was so tender that I was almost unmanned.

I will not dwell upon this part of my narrative; I will only say that
I told him something of my story, and he told me his.

I told him that a terrible trouble had unhinged the mind of a young lady whom I deeply loved, and that she had been lost on the Welsh hills.  I felt that it was only right that I should know more of him before giving him the more intimate details connected with Winnie, myself, and the secrets of my family.  He listened to every word with the deepest attention and sympathy.  After a while he said,

’You must not go to your hotel to-night.  A friend of mine who occupies two rooms is not sleeping here to-night, and I particularly wish for you to take his bed, so that I can see you in the morning.  We shall not breakfast together.  My breakfast is a peculiarly irregular meal.  But when you wake ring your bedroom bell and order your own breakfast; afterwards we shall meet in the studio.’

I did not in the least object to this arrangement, for I found his society a great relief.

Next morning, after I had finished my solitary breakfast, I asked the servant if Mr. D’Arcy had yet risen.  On being told that he had not, I went downstairs into the studio where I had spent the previous evening.  After examining the pictures on the walls and the easels, I walked to the window and looked out at the garden.  It was large, and so neglected and untrimmed as to be a veritable wilderness.  While I was marvelling why it should have been left in this state, I saw the eyes of some animal staring at me from the distance, and was soon astonished to see that they belonged to a little Indian bull.  My curiosity induced me to go into the garden and look at the creature.  He seemed rather threatening at first, but after a while allowed me to go up to him and stroke him.  Then I left the Indian bull and explored this extraordinary domain.  It was full of unkempt trees, including two fine mulberries, and surrounded by a very high wall.  Soon I came across an object which, at first, seemed a little mass of black and white oats moving along, but I presently discovered it to be a hedgehog.  It was so tame that it did not curl up as I approached it, but allowed me, though with some show of nervousness, to stroke its pretty little black snout.  As I walked about the garden, I found it was populated with several kinds of animals such as are never seen except in menageries or in the Zoological Gardens.  Wombats, kangaroos, and the like, formed a kind of happy family.