th-end, and her
misgivings all but vanished, so serious and resolved was his quiet face
in the moonlight. She was half-minded to say to him, "Do you mean that
you love me, Fenwick?" But, then, was it safe to presume on the
peculiarity of her position, of which he, remember, knew absolutely
nothing.

For with her it was not as with another woman, who expects what is
briefly called "an offer." In _her_ case, the man beside her was her
husband, to whose exorcism of her love from his life her heart had
never assented. While, in his eyes, she differed in no way in her
relation to him from any woman, to whom a man, placed as he was,
longs to say that she is what he wants most of all mortal things, but
stickles in the telling of it, from sheer cowardice; who dares not risk
the loss of what share he has in her in the attempt to get the whole.
_She_ grasped the whole position, _he_ only part of it.

"I am glad it is so," she decided to say. "Because each time I see you,
I want to ask if nothing has come back--no trace of memory?"

"Nothing! It is all gone. Nothing comes back."

"Do you remember that about the tennis-court? Did it go any further,
or die out completely?"

He stopped a moment in his walk, and flicked the ash from his cigar;
then, after a moment's thought, replied:

"I am not sure. It seemed to get mixed with my name--on my arm. I
think it was only because tennis and Fenwick are a little alike." His
companion thought how near the edge of a volcano both were, and
resolved to try a crucial experiment. Better an eruption, after all,
or a plunge in the crater, than a life of incessant doubt.

"You remembered the name Algernon clearly?"

"Not _clearly_. But it was the only name with an 'A' that felt right.
Unless it was Arthur, but I'm sure my name never was Arthur!"

"Sally thought it was hypnotic suggestion--thought I had laid an unfair
stress upon it. I easily might have."

"Why? Did you know an Algernon?"

"My husband's name was Algernon." She herself wondered how any voice
that spoke so near a heart that beat as hers did at this moment could
keep its secret. Yet it betrayed nothing, and so supreme was her
self-control that she could say to herself, even while she knew she
would pay for this effort later, that the pallor of her face would
betray nothing either; he would put that down to the moonlight. She
_was_ a strong woman. For she went steadily on, to convince herself
of her own self-command: "I kne