'queer'?"

"Never!" she answered, emphatically. "Never anything so exciting! Merely
deadly and hopelessly commonplace." She picked up the saucer, now
exceedingly empty, and set it upon a shelf by the lattice door. "What
was it about--what was that name?--'Simpledoria'?"

"I will tell you," I said. And I related in detail the singular
performance of which I had been a witness in the late moonlight before
that morning's dawn. As I talked, we half unconsciously moved across the
lawn together, finally seating ourselves upon a bench beyond the
rose-beds and near the high fence. The interest my companion exhibited
in the narration might have surprised me had my nocturnal experience
itself been less surprising. She interrupted me now and then with
little, half-checked ejaculations of acute wonder, but sat for the most
part with her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, her face
turned eagerly to mine and her lips parted in half-breathless attention.
There was nothing "far away" about her eyes now; they were widely and
intently alert.

When I finished, she shook her head slowly, as if quite dumfounded, and
altered her position, leaning against the back of the bench and gazing
straight before her without speaking. It was plain that her neighbor's
extraordinary behavior had revealed a phase of his character novel
enough to be startling.

"One explanation might be just barely possible," I said. "If it is, it
is the most remarkable case of somnambulism on record. Did you ever hear
of Mr. Beasley's walking in his--"