"Oh, well, then, my dear fellow, you must stop it, somehow. You'll know
how to do it."

"I?" said Lanfear, indignantly; but his vexation was not so great that
he did not feel a certain pleasure in fulfilling this strangest part of
his professional duty, when at the beginning of their next excursion he
put Miss Gerald into the victoria with her father and fell back to the
point at which he had seen the lieutenant waiting to haunt their farther
progress. He put himself plumply in front of the officer and demanded in
very blunt Italian: "What do you want?"

The lieutenant stared him over with potential offence, in which his
delicately pencilled mustache took the shape of a light sneer, and
demanded in his turn, in English much better than Lanfear's Italian:
"What right have you to ask?"

"The right of Miss Gerald's physician. She is an invalid in my charge."

A change quite indefinable except as the visible transition from coxcomb
to gentleman passed over the young lieutenant's comely face. "An
invalid?" he faltered.

"Yes," Lanfear began; and then, with a rush of confidence which the
change in the officer's face justified, "one very strangely, very
tragically afflicted. Since she saw her mother killed in an accident a
year ago she remembers nothing. She bowed to you because she saw you
looking at her, and supposed you must be an acquaintance. May I assure
you that you are altogether mistaken?"