At sight of him on the morrow this suspicion hardened almost to certainty. I wished I could meet him alone and ask him if I were not right, and what he had been doing all these years, and why he had left England. He was always with the old lady. It was only on my last day in Lucca that my chance came. I had just lunched, and was seated on a comfortable bench outside my hotel, with a cup of coffee on the table before me, gazing across the faded old sunny piazza and wondering what to do with my last afternoon. It was then that I espied yonder the back of the putative Maltby. I hastened forth to him. He was buying some pink roses, a great bunch of them, from a market-woman under an umbrella. He looked very blank, he flushed greatly, when I ventured to accost him. He admitted that his name was Hilary Maltby. I told him my own name, and by degrees he remembered me. He apologised for his confusion. He explained that he had not talked English, had not talked to an Englishman, ‘for--oh, hundreds of years.’ He said that he had, in the course of his long residence in Lucca, seen two or three people whom he had known in England, but that none of them had recognised him. He accepted (but as though he were embarking on the oddest adventure in the world) my invitation that he should come and sit down and take coffee with me. He laughed with pleasure and surprise at finding that he could still speak his native tongue quite fluently and idiomatically. ‘I know absolutely nothing,’ he said, ‘about England nowadays--except from stray references to it in the Corriere della Sera; nor did he show the faintest desire that I should enlighten him. ‘England,’ he mused, ‘--how it all comes back to me!’ ‘But not you to it?’ ‘Ah, no indeed,’ he said gravely, looking at the roses which he had laid carefully on the marble table. ‘I am the happiest of men.’ He sipped his coffee, and stared out across the piazza, out beyond it into the past. ‘I am the happiest of men,’ he repeated. I plied him with the spur of silence. ‘And I owe it all to having once yielded to a bad impulse. Absurd, the threads our destinies hang on!’ Again I plied him with that spur. As it seemed not to prick him, I repeated the words he had last spoken. ‘For instance?’ I added.