w him very little by that name, though.
I always called him Gerry."

He merely repeated the name thrice, but it gave her a moment of keen
apprehension. Any stirring of memory over it might be the thin end of
a very big wedge. But if there was any, it was an end so thin that
it broke off. Fenwick looked round at her.

"Do you know," he said, "I rather favour the hypnotic suggestion
theory. For the moment you said the name Gerry, I fancied I too knew
it as the short for Algernon. Now, that's absurd! No two people ever
made Gerry out of Algernon. It's always Algy."

"Always. Certainly, it would be odd."

"I am rather inclined to think," said Fenwick, after a short silence,
"that I can understand how it happened. Only then, perhaps, my name may
not be Algernon at all. And here I have been using it, signing with it,
and so on."

"What do you understand?"

"Well, I suspect this. I suspect that you did lay some kind of stress,
naturally, on your husband's name, and also on its abbreviation. It
affected me somehow with a sense of familiarity."

"Is it so _very_ improbable that you were familiar with the name Gerry
too? It might be----"

"Anything might be. But surely we almost know that two accidental
adoptions of Gerry as a short for Algernon would not come across each
other by chance, as yours and mine have done."

"What is 'almost knowing'? But tell me this. When I call you
Gerry--Gerry ... there!--does the association or impression repeat
itself?" She repeated the name once and again, to try. There was a good
deal of nettle-grasping in all this. Also a wish to clinch matters, to
drive the sword to the hilt; to put an end, once and for all, to the
state of tension she lived in. For surely, if anything could prove his
memory was really gone, it would be this. That she should call him by
his name of twenty years ago--should utter it to him, as she could not
help doing, in the tone in which she spoke to him then, and that her
doing so should arouse no memory of the past--surely this would show,
if anything could show it, that that past had been finally erased
from the scroll of his life. She had a moment only of suspense after
speaking, and then, as his voice came in answer, she breathed again
freely. Nothing could have shown a more complete unconsciousness than
his reply, after another moment of reflection:

"Do you know, Mrs. Nightingale, that convinces me that the name
Algernon _was_ produced by your way of sayi