He drew me further along the dewy meadow towards the upper valley, and drew me deeper, as it seemed, into his own strange region whence came these perplexing statements. “But, Julius,” I stammered, seeing that he kept silence, “if she remembers nothing--how could you know--how could you feel sure, when you met her----?” My sentences stopped dead. Even in these unusual circumstances it was not possible to question a friend about the woman he had married. Had she proved some marvel of physical beauty or of intellectual attainment, curiosity might have been taken as a compliment. But as it was----! Yet all the time I _knew_ that her insignificant worldly value was a clean stroke of proof that he had not suffered himself to be deceived in this recovery and recognition of the spiritual maturity he meant by the term “old soul.” His voice reached me, calm and normal as though he talked about the weather. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “for it’s interesting, and, besides, you have the right to know.” And the words fell among my tangled thoughts like deft fingers that put confusion straight. The incredible story he told me as a child might relate a fairy-tale it knows is true, yet thinks may not be quite believed. Without the slightest emphasis, and certainly without the least embarrassment or sense that it was unusual. Even of comedy I was not properly once aware. All through the strange recital rang in my mind, “She is not aware that she remembers.” “‘The Dardanelles,’” he began, smiling a little as though at the recollection, “was where I met her, thus recovered. Not on the way from Smyrna to Constantinople; oh, no! It was not romantic in that little sense. ‘The Dardanelles’ was a small and ugly red-brick villa in Upper Norwood, with a drive ten yards long, ragged laurel bushes, and a green five-barred gate, gold-lettered. Maennlich lives there--the Semitic language man and Egyptologist; you know. She was his parlour-maid at the time, and before that had been lady’s-maid to the daughter of some undistinguished duchess. In this way,” he laughed softly, “may old souls wait upon the young ones sometimes! Her father,” he continued, “was a market-gardener and fruiterer in a largish way at East Croydon, and she herself had been brought up upon the farm whence his supplies came. ‘Chance,’ as they call it, led her into these positions I have mentioned, and so, inevitably--to me.” He looked up at me a moment. “And so to you as well.” His manner was composed and serious. He spoke with the simple conviction of some Christian who traces the Hand of God in the smallest details of his daily life, and seeks His guidance in his very train journeys. There was something rather superb about it all. “A fruiterer in East Croydon! A maid in service! And--you knew--you recognised her?” “At once. The very first day she let me in at the front door and asked if I wished to see her master, what name she might announce, and so forth.”