Afterwards, as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I
found myself trying to account for the flavour of reality that
perplexed me in his impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did
in some way suggest, present, convey--I hardly know which word to
use--experiences it was otherwise impossible to tell.

Well, I don't resort to that explanation now. I have got over
my intervening doubts. I believe now, as I believed at the moment
of telling, that Wallace did to the very best of his ability strip
the truth of his secret for me. But whether he himself saw, or
only thought he saw, whether he himself was the possessor of an
inestimable privilege, or the victim of a fantastic dream, I cannot
pretend to guess. Even the facts of his death, which ended my
doubts forever, throw no light on that. That much the reader must
judge for himself.

I forget now what chance comment or criticism of mine moved so
reticent a man to confide in me. He was, I think, defending
himself against an imputation of slackness and unreliability I had
made in relation to a great public movement in which he had
disappointed me. But he plunged suddenly. "I have" he said, "a
preoccupation--"

"I know," he went on, after a pause that he devoted to the
study of his cigar ash, "I have been negligent. The fact is--it
isn't a case of ghosts or apparitions--but--it's an odd thing to
tell of, Redmond--I am haunted. I am haunted by something--that
rather takes the light out of things, that fills me with longings
. . . . ."

He paused, checked by that English shyness that so often
overcomes us when we would speak of moving or grave or beautiful
things. "You were at Saint Athelstan's all through," he said, and
for a moment that seemed to me quite irrelevant. "Well"--and he
paused. Then very haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily,
he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life, the
haunting memory of a beauty and a happiness that filled his heart
with insatiable longings that made all the interests and spectacle
of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him.

Now that I have the clue to it, the thing seems written
visibly in his face. I have a photograph in which that look of
detachment has been caught and intensified. It reminds me of what
a woman once said of him--a woman who had loved him greatly.
"Suddenly," she said, "the interest goes out of him. He forgets
you. He doesn't care a rap for you--under hi