removal in his shirt did not afflict him
so much as his forgetfulness for so long of the actual furniture; his
conviction of the reality of which lasted on after his discovery about
his costume had made him suspect, in his dream, that he was dreaming.

To a man whose memory is sound, who feels sure he looks back on an
actual past in security, such a dream is only a curiosity of sleep. To
Fenwick it was, like many others of the same sort, a possible herald
of an analogous revelation in waking hours, with a sequel of dreadful
verification from some abysm of an utterly forgotten past.

His worst terror, far and away, was the fear that he was married and a
father. It might have been supposed that this arose from a provisional
sense of pity for the wife and children he must have left; that his
mind would conceive hypothetical poverty for them, or sorrow,
disease, or death, the result direct or indirect of his disappearance.
But this was scarcely the case. They themselves were too intensely
hypothetical. In this respect the blank in his intellect was so
unqualified that it might never have occurred to him to ask himself
the question if they existed had it not been suggested to him by Mrs.
Nightingale herself. It was, in fact, a question she almost always
recurred to when Miss Sally was out of the way. It was no use trying
to talk seriously when that little monkey was there. She turned
everything to a joke. But the Major was quite another thing. He would
back her up in anything reasonable.

"I wish more could be done to find out," said she for the twentieth
time to Fenwick one evening, shortly after the musical recital of last
chapter. "I don't feel as if it was right to give up advertising.
Suppose the poor thing is in Australia or America."

"The poor thing is my hypothetical wife?"

"Exactly so. Well, suppose she is. Some people never see any newspapers
at all. And all the while she may have been advertising for _you_."

"Oh no; we should have been sure to see or hear."

"But why? Now I ask you, Mr. Fenwick, suppose she advertised half a
dozen times in the 'Melbourne Argus' or the 'New York Sun,' _would_
you have seen it, necessarily?"

"_I_ should not, because I never see the 'Melbourne Argus' or the 'New
York Sun.' But those agents we paid to look out go steadily through
the agony columns--the personal advertisements--of the whole world's
press; they would have found it if it had ever been published."

"I dare