Another moment and he was leaning forward, his eyes fixed, his breath straining at his breast. For each word of the speaker now was knocking a sledge-hammer blow upon the blank wall in his brain. Hallelujah Jones had launched into the recital of an incident which had become the _chef d'ouvre_ of his repertory--a story which, though the stern charge of a bishop had kept him silent as to name and locality, yet, possessing the vividness of an actual experience, had lost little in the telling. It was the tale of an evening when he had peered through the tilted window of a chapel, and seen its dissolute rector gambling on the table of the Lord. Back in the shadow the listener, breathless and staring, saw the scene unroll like the shifting slide of a stereopticon--the epitaph on his own dead self. Nerve and muscle and brain tightened as if to withstand a shock, for the man who moved through the pictures was himself! He saw the cards and counters falling on the table, the entrance of the two intruding figures, heard Hugh's wild laugh as he fled, and the grate of the key in the lock behind him as he stood in his study. He heard the rush of the wind past the motor-car, the rustle of dry corn in the hedges, and felt the mist beating on his bare head-- "Palms of Victory, Crowns of Glory! Palms of Victory I shall wear!" He did not know that it was the voice of the street preacher which was singing now. The words shrieked themselves through his brain. Harry Sanderson, not Hugh Stires! Not an outcast! Not criminal, thief and forger! The curtain was rent. The dead wall in his brain was down, and the real past swept over him in an ungovernable flood. Hallelujah Jones had furnished the clue to the maze. His story was the last great wave, which had crumbled, all at once, the cliff of oblivion that the normal process of the recovered mind had been stealthily undermining. The formula, lost so long in the mysterious labyrinth of the brain, had reëstablished itself, and the thousand shreds of recollection that he had misconstrued had fallen into their true place in the old pattern. Harry Sanderson at last knew his past and all of puzzlement and distress that it had held. Shaking in every limb and feeling all along the court-house wall like a drunken man, he made his way to the further deserted street. A passer-by would have shrunk at sight of his face and his burning eyes.