I continued to feel, as I have said, that there was much in Malory’s story which remained to be satisfactorily explained, for I was convinced in my own mind that his interpretation of Ruth Pennistan’s flight, plausible as it was, was totally misleading, with the dangerous verisimilitude of a theory which will fit all, or nearly all, the facts, and yet more entirely miss the truth, by a mere accident, than would a frank perplexity. I think that he himself secretly agreed with me, a conviction I arrived at less by his own doubting words after the reading of the letter, than by his manner towards me when he had finished the story, and his mute, but none the less absolute, refusal to discuss, as I in my interest would willingly have discussed, certain points in his narration. I received the impression that he had chosen me as his audience merely because we knew nothing of one another beyond our names, from a craving to pour out that long dammed-up flood of emotion and meditation. I had—a somewhat galling reflection—played the part of the ground to Malory’s King Midas. I think that his indifference towards me turned to positive dislike after our week of intimacy, and this belief was strengthened when, with scarcely a farewell, he took an abrupt departure. I will confess that I was hurt at the time, but an unaccountable instinct buoyed me up that some day, it might be after the passage of years, I should again be thrown in contact either with him or with his _dramatis personæ_. How this came about I will now tell, though I do not pretend that any more mysterious purpose than my own desire intervened in the accomplishment of my hopes. Perhaps Malory would say that War was my fate, my god in the machine; perhaps it was; I do not know. The definition of fate is a vicious circle; like a little animal, say a mouse, turning after its tail. I left Sampiero in 1914, a year after I had parted there from Malory, and my earlier prophecy justified itself, that our acquaintance would not be continued in our own country. In fact, amid the excitement of the war, I had almost forgotten the man, his habitual reticence, his sudden outburst into narrative, and the unknown, unseen people with whom that narrative had been concerned. But now as I idled disconsolately in London, discharged from hospital but indefinitely unfit for service, there stirred in my memory a recollection of the Pennistans, who were to me so strangely familiar, and I resolved that I would go for myself to pick up the thread where Malory had dropped it, to work on the fields where he had worked, and to probe into the lives he had tried to probe.