For what came about was this. It chanced one evening, some three months after the railway adventure, when Fenwick had become an accepted and constant visitor at Krakatoa Villa, that as he took a very late leave of Sally and her mother, the latter came out with him into the always quiet road, while Sally ran back into the house to direct a letter he was to post, but which had been forgotten for the moment, just as he was departing. They had talked a great deal, and with a closer familiarity than ever before, of the problem of Fenwick's oblivion. Both ladies had gone on the lines of suggesting clues, trying to recall to him the things that _must_ have been in his life as in others. How about his parents? Well, he remembered that, as a fact, he had a father and mother. It was _themselves_ he could not recollect. How about his schooldays? No, that was a blank. He could not even remember having been flogged. Yet the idea of school was not unfamiliar; how, otherwise, could he laugh as he did at the absurdity of forgetting all about it, especially being flogged? But his brothers, his sisters, how _could_ he forget _them_? He _did_, although in their case, as in that of his parents, he somehow knew that some definite identities had existed that he had forgotten. But any effort to recall any specific person came to nothing, or else he only succeeded in reviving images manifestly confused with characters in fiction or history. Then Sally, who was rather incredulous about this complete vacuity of mind, had said to him: "But come now, Mr. Fenwick, you don't mean to say you don't know if you ever had a sweetheart?" And he had replied with a laugh: "My dear Miss Sally, I'm sure I must have had plenty of sweethearts. Perhaps it's because I had so many that I have forgotten them all--all--all! They are all gone with the rest. I can do sums, and can speak French, but what school I learned to keep accounts at I can't tell you; and as to where I lived (as I must have done) among French people to speak French, I can tell no more than Adam." And then he had become rather reserved and silent till he got up to go, and they had not liked to press him for more. The pained look they had often been distressed to see came on his face, and he pressed his fingers on his eyelids as though shutting out the present world might help him to recall the past; then with a rough head-shake of his thick hair, like a big dog, and a brushing of it about with both hands, as though he would rouse this useless head of his to some sort of action, he put the whole thing aside, and talked of other matters till he left the house.