k. It had entered the room along with this man and woman. All
this he did not reason; but indubitably, as if he had so reasoned, he
acted upon it.

He jumped from the chair and ran to the woman. He smelled her hand, and
smelled her as she patted him. Then, as he recognized her, he went wild.
He sprang away, dashing around and around the room, sniffing under the
washstand and smelling out the corners. As in a frenzy he was back to
the woman, whimpering eagerly as she strove to pet him. The next moment,
stiff in a frenzy, he was away again, scurrying about the room and still
whimpering.

Jacob Henderson looked on with mild disapproval.

"He never cuts up that way," he said. "He is a very quiet dog. Maybe it
is a fit he is going to have, though he never has fits."

No one understood, not even Villa Kennan. But Michael understood. He
was looking for that vanished world which had rushed back upon him at
sound of his old-time name. If this name could come to him out of the
Nothingness, as this woman had whom once he had seen treading the beach
at Tulagi, then could all other things of Tulagi and the Nothingness come
to him. As she was there, before him in the living flesh, uttering his
name, so might Captain Kellar, and _Mister_ Haggin, and Jerry be there,
somewhere in the very room or just outside the door.

He ran to the door, whimpering as he scratched at it.

"Maybe he thinks there is something outside," said Jacob Henderson,
opening the door for him.

And Michael did so think. As a matter of course, through that open door,
he was prepared to have the South-Pacific Ocean flow in, bearing on its
bosom schooners and ships, islands and reefs, and all men and animals and
things he once had known and still remembered.

But no past flowed in through the door. Outside was the usual present.
He came back dejectedly to the woman, who still called him Michael as she
petted him. She, at any rate, was real. Next he carefully smelled and
identified the man with the beach of Tulagi and the deck of the _Ariel_,
and again his excitement began to mount.

"Oh, Harley, I know it is he!" Villa cried. "Can't you test him? Can't
you prove him?"

"But how?" Harley pondered. "He seems to recognize his name. It excites
him. And though he never knew us very well, he seems to remember us and
to be excited by us, too. If only he could talk . . . "

"Oh, talk! Talk!" Villa pleaded with Michael, catching both sides o