'll tell Sally...." a threat which seems to have a softening
effect. "Can't you see, dear, that there is some misunderstanding?"
Fenwick looks from her to the Baron, puzzled. The latter drops his
jocular rallying.

"I saw last night you did not know me, Mr. Harrisson. That is
straintch! Have you forgotten Diedrich Kreutzkammer?" He says his name
with a sort of quiet confidence of immediate recognition. But Fenwick
only looks blankly at him.

"He does not know me!" cries the German, with an astonished voice.
"'Frisco--the Klondyke--Chicago--the bridge at Brooklyn--why, it is not
two years ago...." He pauses between the names of the places, enforcing
each as a reminder with an active forefinger.

Fenwick seems suddenly to breathe the fresh air of a solution of the
problem. He breaks into a sunny smile, to his wife's great relief.

"Indeed, Baron Kreutzkammer, _my_ name is not Harrisson. _My_ name is
Fenwick, and this lady is my wife--Mrs. Fenwick. I have never been in
any of the places you mention." For the moment he forgot his own state
of oblivion: a thing he was getting more and more in the habit of
doing. The Baron looked intently at him, and looked again. He slapped
his forehead, not lightly at all, but as if good hard slaps would
really correct his misapprehensions and put him right with the world.

"I am all _wronck_" he said, borrowing extra force from an indurated
_g_. "But it is ferry bustling--I am bustled!" By this he meant
puzzled. Fenwick felt apologetic.

"I don't know how to thank you for the cigar Mr. Harrisson ought to
have had," said he. He felt really ashamed of having smoked it under
false pretences.

"You shall throw it away, and I giff you one for yourself. That is
eacey! But I am bustled."

He continued puzzled. Mrs. Fenwick felt that he was only keeping
further comment and inquiry in check because it would have been
a doubt thrown on her husband's word to make any. Her uneasiness
would have been visible if her power of concealing it had not been
fortified by her belief that his happiness as well as hers depended
(for the present, at any rate) on his ignorance of his own past.
Perhaps she was wrong; with that we have nothing to do; we are telling
of things as they happened. Only we wish to record our conviction that
Rosalind Fenwick was acting for her husband's sake as well as her
own--not from a vulgar instinct of self-preservation.

The Baron made conversation, and polished his little