nsciously making Rosey look _younger_.
I can't help my mind--my _now_ mind--working, do what I will! But as
to where it was, I fancy I have a clue. I can remember remembering--if
you understand me--that I had been in Australia--remembered it at
Ontario--talked about it to Tina Clemenceau...."

If Vereker had had any tendency to get on a true scent at this point,
the reference to Australia would have thrown him off it. And the
thought of the Canadian girl took Fenwick's mind once more to his
American life: "It was my thinking of that girl made all this come
back to me, you know. Just after you left us, when we were throwing
stones in the sea, last night...."

"Throwing stones in the sea?..."

"Yes--we went down to the waves on the beach, and my throwing a stone
in reminded me of it all, after. I was just going to get to sleep,
when, all of a sudden, what must I think of but Niagara!--at least,
the rapids. I was standing with Mademoiselle Tina--no one else--on
a rock overlooking the great torrent, and I threw a stone in, and she
said no one would ever see that stone again. I said, 'Like a man when
he dies and is forgotten,' or something of that sort. I recollect her
now--poor child!--turning her eyes full on me and saying, 'But I
should not forget you, Mr. Harrisson.' You see how it was? Only it
seems a sort of disloyalty to the poor girl to tell it. It was all
plain, and she meant it to be. I can't remember now whether I said,
'I can't marry you, Tina, because I don't know that my wife is dead,'
or whether I only thought it. But I know that I then knew I was, or
had been, married and divorced or deserted. And it was that unhappy
stone that brought it all back to me."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Quite sure that began it. I was just off, and some outlying scrap
of my mind was behindhand, and that stone saw it and pounced on it.
I remembered more after that. I know I was rather glad to start off
to the new gold river, because of Ernestine Clemenceau. I don't think
I should have cared to marry Ernestine. Anyhow, I didn't. She seems
to me Harrisson's affair now. Don't laugh at me, doctor!"

"I wasn't laughing." And, indeed, this was true. The doctor was very
far from laughing.

They had walked some little way inland, keeping along a road sunk in
the chalk. This now emerged on an exposed hill-side, swept by the
sea wind; which, though abated, still made talk less easy than in the
sheltered trench, or behind the long wa