ause. The doctor walked beside him, also silent, for a few paces.
Then he spoke:

"You will have to bear this, Fenwick, and keep your head. It is just
as I told you it would be. It is all coming back." He laid his left
hand on his companion's shoulder as they stood side-by-side on the
chalk pathway, and with his right felt the wrist that was nearest
him. Fenwick was in a quiver all through his frame, and his pulse was
beating furiously as Dr. Conrad's finger touched it. But he spoke
with self-control, and his step was steady as they walked on slowly
together the moment after.

"It's all coming back. It _has_ come back. I shall remember all in
time." Then he repeated Vereker's words, "I must keep my head. I shall
have to bear this," and walked on again in silence. The young man
beside him still felt he had best not speak yet. Just let the physical
perturbation subside. Talking would only make it worse.

They may have walked so for two minutes before Fenwick spoke again.
Then he roused himself, to say, with but little hint in his voice of
any sense of the oddity of his question: "Which is my dream?--this or
the other?" Then added: "That's the question I want to ask, and nobody
can answer."

"And of course all the while each of us knows perfectly well the
answer is simply 'Neither.' You are a man that has had an accident,
and lost his memory. Be patient, and do not torment yourself. Let it
take its own time."

"All right, doctor! Patience is the word." He spoke in an undertone--a
voice of acquiescence, or rather obedience. "Perhaps it will not be so
bad when I remember more." They walked on again.

Then Vereker, noting that during silence he brooded under the
oppression of what he had already recovered from the past, and to
all appearance struck, once or twice, on some new unwelcome vein of
thought, judging from a start or a momentary tension of the arm that
now held his, decided that it would be as well to speak to him now,
and delay no longer.

"Has anything come back to you, so far, that will unsettle your
present life?"

"No, no--not that, thank God! Not so far as I can see. But much that
must disquiet it; it cannot be otherwise."

"Do you mind telling me?"

"No, surely, dear fellow!--surely I will tell you. Why should I not?
But what I say to you don't repeat to Sally or her mother. Not just
now, you know. Wait!"

There was a recess in the wall of mortar-bedded flints that ran along
the path, which wou