them in the
earlier days of his illness; but his clear and decided answers to their
questions convinced them that memory had to some extent returned. As a
matter of fact it was not memory that had returned, but a sharpening of
his perceptive faculties, awakening him to the fact that he stood in
danger of being taken for an idiot or a madman if he did not frame some
answer to the questions which the doctors asked him. This new acuteness
was perhaps the precursor to a return of his memory; but as yet the Past
was like a dead wall, an abyss of darkness surrounding him. Now and then
flashes of light seemed to dart across that darkness: he seemed on the
point of recalling something--he knew not what; for the flashes faded as
quickly as they came, and made the darkness all the greater for the
contrast.

He was possessed now by the idea that if he could get out of hospital,
and walk along the London streets, he might remember all that he had
forgotten. His own name, his own history, had become a blank to him. He
knew in some vague, forlorn fashion, that he had once been what the
world calls a gentleman. He had not acknowledged so much to the doctors:
he had not felt that they would believe him. Even when the groping after
the Past became most painful, he made up his mind that he would not ask
these scientific men for help: he was afraid of being treated as a
"case," experimented on, written about in the papers. There was
something in the Past of which he knew he ought to be ashamed. What
could it be? He was afraid to ask, lest he might find himself to be a
criminal.

In these haunting terrors there was, of course, a distinct token of
possible insanity. The man needed a friendly, guiding hand to steer him
back to the world of reason and common-sense. But to whom could he go,
since he had taken up this violent prejudice against the doctors? He
felt drawn to none of the nurses, although some of them had been very
kind to him. The only person to whom he might perhaps have disburthened
himself, if he had had the opportunity, was the sweet-voiced,
sweet-faced woman whom he had warned of the ill effects of her gifts. He
did not know her name, or anything about her; but before he left the
hospital he asked one of the nurses who she was.

"Lady Alice Brooke--daughter of the Lord Courtleroy, who died the other
day," was the reply.

"Could you give me her address?"

"No; and I don't think that if I could it would be of any use to