ng it. It _was_ hypnotic
suggestion! I assure you that, however strange you may think it, every
time you repeat the name Gerry, it seems more familiar to me. If you
said it often enough, I have no doubt I should soon be believing in the
diminutive as devoutly as I believe in the name itself. Because I am
quite convinced of Algernon Fenwick. Continually signing _per-pro_'s
has driven it home." He didn't seem quite in earnest over his
conviction, though--seemed to laugh a little about it.

But a sadder tone came into his voice after an interval in which his
companion, frightened at her own temerity, resolved that she would not
call him Gerry again. It was sailing too near the wind. She was glad he
went back from this side-channel of their talk to the main subject.

"No, I have no hope of getting to the past through my own mind. I feel
it is silence. And that being so, I should be sorry that any
illumination should come to me out of the past, throwing light on
records my mind could not read--I mean, any proof positive of what my
crippled memory could not confirm. I would rather remain quite in the
dark--unless, indeed----"

"Unless what?"

"Unless the well-being of some others, forgotten with my forgotten
world, is involved in--dependent on--my return to it. That would be
shocking--the hungry nestlings in the deserted nest. But I am so
convinced that I have only forgotten a restless life of rapid
change--that I _could_ not forget love and home, if I ever had
them--that my misgivings about this are misgivings of the reason
only, not of the heart. Do you understand me?"

"Perfectly. At least, I think so. Go on."

"I cannot help thinking, too, that a sense of a strong link with a
forgotten yesterday would survive the complete effacement of all its
details in the form of a wish to return to it. I have none. My to-day
is too happy for me to wish to go back to that yesterday, even if I
could, without a wrench. I feel a sort of shame in saying I should be
sorry to return to it. It seems a sort of ... a sort of disloyalty to
the unknown."

"You might long to be back, if you could know. Think if you could see
before you now, and recognise the woman who was once your wife." There
was nettle-grasping in this.

"It is a mere abstract idea," he replied, "unaccompanied by any image
of an individual. I perceive that it is dutiful to recognise the fact
that I should welcome her _if_ she appeared as a reality. But it is a
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