my goose-feather bed?
What care I for my money oh?"

and hearing her so sing had somehow imputed to the parade of bravado
in the swing of its rhythm a something that might have belonged to a
touched chord. Like enough a mistake of his, said Reason. But for all
that the reminiscence played its part in soothing Fenwick's misgivings
of his own rashness.

"The kitten's all right," said he to himself. "And if she doesn't want
Master Conrad, the sooner he knows it the better!" But he had little
doubt of the course things would take as he stopped to look at that
venturesome star, that seemed to be going altogether too near the moon
for safety.

In a few moments he turned again towards home. And then his mind
must needs go off to the thing of all others he wished not to think
of--_himself_. He had come to see this much clearly, that until
the veil floated away from between him and his past and left the
whole atmosphere transparent, there could be no certainty that a
recrudescence of that past would not be fatal to his wife's happiness.
And inevitably, therefore, to his own. Having once formulated the idea
that for the future _he_ was to be one person and Harrisson another, he
found its entertainment in practice easier than he had anticipated. He
had only to say to himself that it was for her sake that he did it, and
he did not find it altogether impossible to dismiss his own identity
from the phantasmagoria that kept on coming back and back before his
mind, and to assign the whole drama to another person; to whom he
allowed the name of Harrisson all the easier from his knowledge that
it never had been really his own. Very much the easier, too, no
doubt, from the sense that the function of memory was still diseased,
imperfect, untrustworthy. How could it be otherwise when he still was
unable to force it back beyond a certain limit? It was mainly a vision
of America, and, previous to that, a mystery of interminable avenues
of trees, and an inexplicable horror of a struggle with death. There
he always lost himself. In the hinterland of this there was that vision
of a wedding somewhere. And then bewilderment, because the image of
his living wife, his very soul of the world he now dwelt in, the woman
whose daughter had grown into his heart as his own--yes, not only the
image, but the very name of her--had come in and supplanted that of the
forgotten wife of that forgotten day. So much so that more than once,
in striving to fo