"I can remember nothing of the story; or what seems to come I _know_ is only confusion ... by things in it...." Vereker thought it might be well to change the current of his thoughts. "Who were the Clemenceaux at Ontario?" said he. "Of course, I ought to tell you that. Only there were so many things. Clemenceau was a jeweller at Ontario. I lived in the flat over his shop, and used to see a great deal of his family. I must have lived almost entirely among French Canadians while I was there--it was quite three or four years...." "And all that time, Fenwick, you thought of yourself as a married man?" "Married or divorced--yes. And long before that." "It is quite impossible for me--you must see it--to form any picture in my mind of how the thing presents itself to you." "Quite." "It seems--to me--perfectly incredible that you should have no recollection at all of the marriage, or divorce, or whatever it was...." "I did not say I had no recollection _at all_. Listen. Don't you know this, Vereker?--of course you do, though--how one wakes from a hideous dream and remembers exactly the feeling it produced, and how the same feeling comes back when one recalls from the dream some fragment preserved from all one has forgotten of it--something nowise horrible in itself, but from its associations in the dream?" "Oh yes, perfectly!" "Well--that's my case. When I try to bring back the memories I know I _must_ have had at that time in Canada, nothing comes back but a horror--something like a story read in boyhood and shuddered at in the night--but all details gone. I mean all details with horror in them. Because, do you know?..." "Yes----?" Vereker stopped beside him on the path, as Fenwick stopped and hesitated. Utter perplexity almost forbidding speech was the impression the doctor received of his condition at this moment. After a moment's silence he continued: "You will hardly believe me, but almost the only thing I can revive--that is, have revived so far--is an occurrence that must needs at the time have been a happiness and a delight. And yet it now presents itself to me as an excruciating torment--as part of some tragedy in which I had to be an actor, but of which I can seize no detail that does not at once vanish, leaving mere pain and confusion." "What was it? You don't mind...." "Mind telling you? Oh no!--why should I? I may be happier if I can tell it. It's like this. I am at a railway-station in the heat somewhere, and am expecting a girl who is coming to marry me. I can remember the heat and our meeting, and then all is Chaos again. Then, instead of remembering more, I go over and over again the old thing as at first.... No! nothing new presents itself. Only the railway-station and the palm-trees in the heat. And the train coming slowly in, and my knowing that she is in it, and coming to marry me." "Do you mean that the vision--or scene--in your mind stops dead, and you don't see her get out of the carriage?"