The Silver Dragon Read Online Free

time in her room, talking, reasoning, assuring and all the while watching for the slightest hint of diminishing amnesia.
    “It’s my job,” he said lightly. “You don’t owe me anything. I’m a doctor and I must explore every avenue to make you well. I also happen to have a great fund of patience,” he added. “Enough, perhaps, for us both.”
    “Supposing it was the address of a hotel, or a pension, or something,” she suggested. “It could be closed for the winter, couldn’t it?”
    “It could be,” he agreed, “but somehow I don’t think it is. I mean, I don’t think it’s a hotel,” he added. “Not with a name like that.”
    She forced a smile.
    “Which isn’t exactly sound reasoning,” she pointed out. “It’s a very expressive name, but lots of hotels have descriptive names.”
    “Like the Bellevue and the De la Mer and the Hotel Terminus,” he agreed. “Even the De la Plage, which can turn out disconcertingly to be over a mile from the sea! I’ll agree with you there, but this place sounds private to me. It’s a sort of personal name. Or so I feel. Don’t ask me why,” he added, “because I couldn’t give you a sound reason for thinking as I do. I just feel it in my bones.”
    He was looking down at her, sorry for her, she supposed, and doing what he could to cheer her up in the face of what she was forced to admit was a steadily growing disappointment.
    She had pinned all her hopes on the address they had found and to the letter Professor Attenhofer had written to Les Rochers Blanches. But once more they had come up against a blank wall.
    “Give them time,” John advised, putting a firm hand on her shoulder. “It’s only four days after all.”
    It had seemed more like four years. Rather shakily she got to her feet, crossing to the window to look out. The world she saw seemed inordinately bright, full of an almost garish sunlight, which had no real warmth in it, but perhaps she was seeing everything through a haze of unreality just now. If only there had been a reply to the professor’s letter—some sort of reply!
    “We’ll give them another two days,” John decided, “and then I think we ought to do something definite.”
    She looked around at him with a question in her gray eyes, and he smiled back at her with the utmost confidence.
    “Such as going to see for ourselves,” he said.
    “We?” she echoed. “But this isn’t your affair, John.”
    He came to stand beside her.
    “I think it is,” he said slowly. “You were my last case. I can’t move on and leave the cure half completed.”
    As their eyes met and held she was aware of a strange sense of loss.
    “You’re leaving the clinic?” she asked. “You’re ... going home?”
    He fumbled for a cigarette and offered her one and lighted them before he answered.
    “My time with the professor is up,” he explained . “I came over here on a six-month .postgraduate course, which has taught me a lot, but now it’s time to move on.”
    “Back to England?”
    “Eventually.” He bent o v er and took the cigarette from between her fingers. “Y’know,” he said with exaggerated lightness, “that’s something else we’ve learned. You were not a habitual smoker.”
    “How do you know?”
    “By the way you handle a cigarette and the odd little expression of distaste when you let the smoke get into your eyes!” He snubbed what remained of her cigarette into an ashtray. “So far so good! What I was about to say was that I intended to take a holiday when my course was over, a sort of roving affair along the south coast and down through Italy. It’s a route I’ve always fancied, and I don’t really need to be back in London much before July.”
    “Have you ... no one to go back to?” she asked uncertainly, thinking that she had no right to probe into his personal background in this way, but obeying an impulse to know more about him that she could not cheek.
    “Dozens of casual acquaintances,” he assured