urn to an oddity like Tims for advice and
sympathy.

"Whom ought I to go to, then?" he asked, good-humoredly, and looking
particularly long as he rose from the depths of the low wicker chair. "A
medicine-man with horns and a rattle?"

"Well," returned Tims with deliberation, pulling on a pair of thread
gloves, "I dare say he could teach Norton-Smith a thing or two. Mind
you, I'm not talking spiritualistic rot; I'm talking scientific facts,
which every one knows except the English scientific men, who keep on
clapping their glass to the blind eye like a lot of clock-work Nelsons.
The effects of hypnotism are as much facts as the effects of a bottle of
whiskey. But Milly's case is different. In my opinion she's developed an
independent double personality. It's an inconvenient state of things,
but I don't suppose it'll last forever. One or the other will get
stronger and 'hold the fort.' But it's rather a bad business anyhow."
Tims paused and sighed, drawing on the other glove. "I'm--I'm fond of
them both myself, and I expect you'll feel the same, when you see the
difference."

Ian laughed awkwardly, his brown eyes fixed scrutinizingly upon her.

"So long as the fort holds somebody, I sha'n't worry," he said, lightly.

They went out, and as he led his own bicycle towards the upper track,
Tims spun down the steep drive, and, turning into the lane, kissed her
hand to him in farewell from under the brim of her perennially crooked
hat.

"That Timson girl's more than queer," he mused to himself, going on.
"There's a streak of real insanity in her. I'm afraid it's not been good
for a highly strung creature like Mildred to see so much of her; and why
on earth did she?"

He tried to clear his mind of Tims's fantastic suggestions; of
everything, indeed, except the freshness of the air rushing past him,
the beauty of the wide view, steeped in the romance of distance. But
memory, that strange, recalcitrant, mechanical slave of ours, kept
diving, without connivance of his, into the recesses of the past twenty
months of his life, and presenting to him unsolicited, circumstances,
experiences, which he had thrust away unclassified--his own surprise,
almost perplexity, when Mildred had brought him work for the first time
after her illness that autumn Term before last; his disappointment and
even boredom in his engagement and the first three weeks of his
marriage; then the change in his own feelings after her long sleep at
the Hote