til the doctor told me days afterwards that I had caught my foot as I
was running downstairs. He told me then it was no use trying to
remember the time just before," she went on in a low, anxious voice,
something stirring uneasily within her: "that it might not come back at
all. It seems it doesn't sometimes to people who have that sort of
accident."

Rendel, his eyes fixed on the ground, had been listening; he took in the
meaning of her words and tried to realise their bearing on himself, but
he was too far gone on the slope to stop. It was clear that she would
not know what had happened, unless she were told by himself... and yet,
who could tell how the awakening would come? it might even be in a worse
form when she was able once more to mix with her kind.

"Rachel," he said. "I want to tell you something that happened the day
before your father became worse, the day before you had that accident,
the last day, in fact, that you remember." She looked at him with
anxious eagerness. "Something tremendously important happened. Lord
Stamfordham brought me some private notes of his own to decipher and
copy."

"Of course," said Rachel, "that I remember. In your study downstairs."

"You remember?" said Rendel eagerly. Then instantly conscious, alas,
that the evidence could do him no kind of good, "that I gave some papers
to Thacker to take to Stamfordham?"

"Stop a minute," said Rachel. "Yes, I remember that too. My father
wanted to play chess afterwards, but he was too tired."

"In those papers," said Rendel, "there was a very important secret,
though it didn't remain a secret," he added, with a bitter little laugh,
"for twenty-four hours. Those papers contained the notes of a
conversation at the German Embassy at which that agreement was decided
upon by which Germany and England divided Africa between them. It was
_I_ copied those papers from Stamfordham's notes. I copied the map of
Africa with a line down the middle of it. The next morning, no one knew
how or why, that map appeared in the _Arbiter_."

Rachel looked at him, still not understanding all that was implied.

"Do you see what that means for me?" Rendel said. "It was not
Stamfordham published it, he did not mean to do so until the moment
should come, and since I was the person who had had the original notes,
he thought that I had published it; that I had let it out, somehow."

"You!" said Rachel, with wide-open eyes.

"Yes," said Rendel shortly. "That I