er the question, as at that moment orders
came for us to report ourselves.

Never had I seen a man so excited as the colonel was when the story was
told to him. First of all he stared at us as though we were madmen,
then laughter overcame his astonishment, and he fairly roared with
merriment.

'The brigadier and the divisional general must hear of it at once!' he
cried. 'Why, it is the greatest thing since the war began! And you
did nothing, Luscombe?'

'Nothing,' I said; 'this man did it all.' And I enlarged upon the
difficulties of the situation, and the way Paul Edgecumbe had overcome
them.

'Well, Edgecumbe,' I said, when at length I had an opportunity of
speaking to him alone, 'give me an account of yourself. Where have you
been? what have you been doing? and how have things been going with
you?'

'All right, sir. As to where I have been, and what I have been doing,
it's not worth telling about.'

'You don't mind my asking you awkward questions, do you?'

'Not a bit. Ask what you like, sir.'

'Has your memory come back?'

A shadow passed over his face, and a suggestion of the old yearning
look came into his eyes.

'No,--no, nothing. Strange, isn't it? Ever since that day when I
found myself a good many miles away from Bombay, and realized that I
was alive, everything stands out plainly in my memory; but before
that,--nothing. I could describe to you in detail almost everything
that has taken place since then. But there seems to be a great, black
wall which hides everything that took place before. I shudder at it
sometimes because it looks so impenetrable. Now and then I have
dreams, the same old dreams of black, evil faces, and flashing knives,
and cries of agony; but they are only dreams,--I remember nothing.'

'During the time you were in England training,' I said, 'you went to
various parts of the country?'

'Yes, I was in Exeter, Swindon, Bramshott, Salisbury Plain.'

'And you recognized none of them, you'd no feeling that you had seen
those places before?'

'No.'

'Faces, now,' I urged; 'do you ever see faces which suggest people you
have known in the past?'

He was silent for two or three seconds.

'Yes, and no,' he replied. 'I see faces sometimes which, while they
don't cause me to remember, give me strange fancies and
incomprehensible longings. Sometimes I hear names which have the same
effect upon me.'

'And your memory has been good for ordinary things?'

He laug