same, old
boy, don't you?"

The speech was the reverse of soothing, even to its detail of "old boy."
He looked at his teacup and drew his black brows together.

"I'm afraid I don't understand, Miss Timson. I suppose you think it a
joke, but to me it seems rather a serious matter."

"Of course it is; uncommon serious," returned Tims, too much interested
in her subject to consider the husband's feelings. "Bless you! _I_ don't
want to be responsible for it. At first I thought it was a simple case
of a personality evolved by hypnotism; but if so it would have depended
on the hypnotist, and you see it didn't after the first."

"I don't think we need bother about hypnotism"--there was a note of
impatience in Ian's voice--"it's just a case of collapse of memory. But
as you were with her the first time it happened, I want to know exactly
how far the collapse went. There were signs of it every now and then in
her work, but on the whole it improved."

"You never can tell what will happen in these cases," said Tims. "She
remembered her book-learning pretty well, but she forgot her own name,
and as to people and things that had happened, she was like a new-born
babe. If I hadn't nursed her through she'd have been sent to a lunatic
asylum. But it wasn't that, after all, that made it so exciting. It was
the difference between Milly's two personalities. You don't mean to say,
old chap, you've lived with her for seven months and can't see the
difference?"

Tims looked at him. She held strong theoretical views as to the
stupidity of the male, but circumstances had seldom before allowed her
to put them to the test. Behold them more than justified; for Ian was
far above the average in intelligence. He, for a fraction of a minute,
paused, deliberately closing the shutter of his mind against an
unpleasant search-light that shot back on the experiences of his
courtship and marriage.

"Well, I suppose I'm not imaginative," he returned, with a dry laugh. "I
only see certain facts about her memory and want more of them, to tell
Norton-Smith when I take her up to see him."

"Norton-Smith!" exclaimed Tims. "What is the good? Englishmen are all
right when it's a question of filling up the map of Africa, but they're
no good on the dark continent of ourselves. They're cowards. That's
what's the matter with them. Don't go to Norton-Smith."

Stewart made an effectual effort to overcome his irritation. He ought to
have known better than to t