ht."

"Oh!" I said with sudden enlightenment. "I believe I saw them." At the
back of my mind I was struggling desperately with a vague remembrance.
It may sound incredible, but I had only the dimmest memory of my later
experience of the child. The train incident was still fresh in my mind,
but I could not remember what Stott had told me when I talked with him
by the pond. I seemed to have an impression that the child had some
strange power of keeping people at a distance; or was I mixing up
reality with some Scandinavian fairy tale?

"Very likely, sir," Mrs. Berridge went on. "What upset Mrs. Stott was
that her boy's never upset by anything--he has a curious way of looking
at you, sir, that makes you wish you wasn't there; but from what Mrs.
Stott says, this 'Arrison boy wasn't to be drove off, anyhow, and her
son came in quite flurried like. Mrs. Stott seemed quite put out about
it."

Doubtless I might have had more information from my landlady, but I was
struggling to reconstruct that old experience which had slipped away
from me, and I nodded and turned back to the book I had been pretending
to read. Mrs. Berridge was one of those unusual women--for her station
in life--who know when to be silent, and she finished her clearing away
without initiating any further remarks.

When she had finished I went out onto the Common and looked for the pond
where I had talked with Ginger Stott.

I found it after a time, and then I began to gather up the threads I had
dropped.

It all came back to me, little by little. I remembered that talk I had
had with him, his very gestures; I remembered how he had spoken of
habits, or the necessity for the lack of them, and that took me back to
the scene in the British Museum Reading Room, and to my theory. I was
suddenly alive to that old interest again.

I got up and walked eagerly in the direction of Mrs. Stott's cottage.

CHAPTER XV

THE INCIPIENCE OF MY SUBJECTION TO THE WONDER

I

Victor Stott was in his eighth year when I met him for the third time. I
must have stayed longer than I imagined by the pond on the Common, for
Mrs. Stott and her son had had tea, and the boy was preparing to go out.
He stopped when he saw me coming; an unprecedented mark of recognition,
so I have since learned.

As I saw him then, he made a remarkable, but not a repulsively abnormal
figure. His baldness struck one immediately, but it did not give him a
look of age. Then one noticed tha