man's blinking eyes.
There was a moment of suspense, then a sharp, breathless cry which ended
in a wail.

"Take it away," Monty moaned. "I lost it long ago. I don't want to see
it! I don't want to think."

"I have come," Trent said, with an unaccustomed gentleness in his tone,
"to make you think. I want you to remember that that is a picture of
your daughter. You are rich now and there is no reason why you should
not come back to her. Don't you understand, Monty?"

It was a grey, white face, shrivelled and pinched, weak eyes without
depth, a vapid smile in which there was no meaning. Trent, carried away
for a moment by an impulse of pity, felt only disappointment at the
hopelessness of his task. He would have been honestly glad to have
taken the Monty whom he had known back to England, but not this man!
For already that brief flash of awakened life seemed to have died away.
Monty's head was wagging feebly and he was casting continually little,
furtive glances towards the town.

"Please go away," he said. "I don't know you and you give me a pain in
my head. Don't you know what it is to feel a buzz, buzz, buzzing inside?
I can't remember things. It's no use trying."

"Monty, why do you look so often that way?" Trent said quietly. "Is some
one coming out from the town to see you?"

Monty threw a quick glance at him and Trent sighed. For the glance was
full of cunning, the low cunning of the lunatic criminal.

"No one, no one," he said hastily. "Who should come to see me? I'm only
poor Monty. Poor old Monty's got no friends. Go away and let me dig."

Trent walked a few paces apart, and passed out of the garden to a low,
shelving bank and looked downward where a sea of glass rippled on to the
broad, firm sands. What a picture of desolation! The grey, hot mist,
the whitewashed cabin, the long, ugly potato patch, the weird, pathetic
figure of that old man from whose brain the light of life had surely
passed for ever. And yet Trent was puzzled. Monty's furtive glance
inland, his half-frightened, half-cunning denial of any anticipated
visit suggested that there was some one else who was interested in his
existence, and some one too with whom he shared a secret. Trent lit a
cigar and sat down upon the sandy turf. Monty resumed his digging. Trent
watched him through the leaves of a stunted tree, underneath which he
had thrown himself.

For an hour or more nothing happened. Trent smoked, and Monty, who had
apparently fo