“You seem very sure of the impression you made on me.” “I am.” “And I’ve forgotten all about it!” “You haven’t forgotten the impression; you’ve only forgotten me.” “Oh, Mr. Melbury, tell me! Please! I’ve got to run off and overtake Mrs. Grace; and I can’t do it unless I know.” You will admit that my duty at this juncture required some considering. In the end I said: “I sha’n’t tell you to-day. I may do it later. In any case, I’ve given you so many tips that you can’t fail to see for yourself what they lead to. You’ll probably have recalled by to-night.” “Then I shall ring you up to-morrow and tell you.” “No, please don’t do that; and yet, on second thoughts, I know that when you’ve remembered you won’t want to.” She said, while withdrawing again toward the adjoining room, “You certainly know how to make a thing mysterious.” “I’m not making anything mysterious. You’ll see that, after it’s all come back to you.” But, having passed into the next room, she returned to the threshold to say: “I know you’re only making fun of me. I never met you, because I couldn’t have forgotten you. And I couldn’t have forgotten you, because you’re so like your brother. But we’ll talk about it all some other time.” The first thing I did was to go to a room where there was a full-length mirror fixed to the wall and examine myself in the glass. Was it possible that I had changed so much in the brief space of four months? The reflection told me nothing. In the tall, slim figure in the neat gray check I could still see the sinister fellow who had slept at Greeley’s Slip and skulked about the Park and crept into a house at midnight. The transformation had come so imperceptibly that the one image was no more vital to me than the other. Inwardly, too, I felt no great assurance against a relapse. I was like an insect toiling up a slippery perpendicular. Not only was each step difficult, but it might in the end land me at the bottom where I began. In other words, I had still within me the potentialities of the drunkard; and to the drunkard all aberrations are possible. That night I put the question up to Lovey. “Lovey, do I look the same as I did four or five months ago?” “You looks just as good to me, sonny.” “Yes, but suppose you hadn’t seen me in the mean while, and had come on me all of a sudden, would you know right off that it was me?” “Slim, if I was blind and deaf and dumb, and couldn’t see nothink nor ’ear nothink nor feel nothink, I’d know it was you if you come ’arf a mile from where I was.” Since this intuitiveness was of no help to me, I worked round to the subject when, later in the evening, I had gone in to smoke a good-night pipe with Cantyre.