ried and divorced or
something--there was something rum, long before--and you know Papists
would rather the Devil outright than have their daughter marry a
divorced man. But as to who the wife had been, and what it was all
about...."

He stopped again suddenly, seizing Vereker by the arm with a strong
hand that trembled as it had done before. His face went very white,
but he kept self-possession, as it were mechanically; so completely
that the long ash on his half-smoked cigar remained unbroken. He
waited a moment, and then spoke in a controlled way.

"I can remember nothing of the story; or what seems to come I _know_
is only confusion ... by things in it...." Vereker thought it might
be well to change the current of his thoughts.

"Who were the Clemenceaux at Ontario?" said he.

"Of course, I ought to tell you that. Only there were so many things.
Clemenceau was a jeweller at Ontario. I lived in the flat over his
shop, and used to see a great deal of his family. I must have lived
almost entirely among French Canadians while I was there--it was
quite three or four years...."

"And all that time, Fenwick, you thought of yourself as a married man?"

"Married or divorced--yes. And long before that."

"It is quite impossible for me--you must see it--to form any picture
in my mind of how the thing presents itself to you."

"Quite."

"It seems--to me--perfectly incredible that you should have no
recollection at all of the marriage, or divorce, or whatever it
was...."

"I did not say I had no recollection _at all_. Listen. Don't you know
this, Vereker?--of course you do, though--how one wakes from a hideous
dream and remembers exactly the feeling it produced, and how the
same feeling comes back when one recalls from the dream some fragment
preserved from all one has forgotten of it--something nowise horrible
in itself, but from its associations in the dream?"

"Oh yes, perfectly!"

"Well--that's my case. When I try to bring back the memories I know
I _must_ have had at that time in Canada, nothing comes back but a
horror--something like a story read in boyhood and shuddered at in
the night--but all details gone. I mean all details with horror in
them. Because, do you know?..."

"Yes----?" Vereker stopped beside him on the path, as Fenwick stopped
and hesitated. Utter perplexity almost forbidding speech was the
impression the doctor received of his condition at this moment. After
a moment's silence he continu