Mrs. Berridge passed that by. "His mother's in trouble about him this morning," she said. "She's such a nice, respectable woman, and has all her milk and eggs and butter off of us. She was here this morning while you were out, sir, and, what I could make of it that 'Arrison boy had been chasing her boy on the Common last night." "Oh!" I said with sudden enlightenment. "I believe I saw them." At the back of my mind I was struggling desperately with a vague remembrance. It may sound incredible, but I had only the dimmest memory of my later experience of the child. The train incident was still fresh in my mind, but I could not remember what Stott had told me when I talked with him by the pond. I seemed to have an impression that the child had some strange power of keeping people at a distance; or was I mixing up reality with some Scandinavian fairy tale? "Very likely, sir," Mrs. Berridge went on. "What upset Mrs. Stott was that her boy's never upset by anything--he has a curious way of looking at you, sir, that makes you wish you wasn't there; but from what Mrs. Stott says, this 'Arrison boy wasn't to be drove off, anyhow, and her son came in quite flurried like. Mrs. Stott seemed quite put out about it." Doubtless I might have had more information from my landlady, but I was struggling to reconstruct that old experience which had slipped away from me, and I turned back to the book I had been pretending to read. Mrs. Berridge was one of those unusual women--for her station in life--who know when to be silent, and she finished her clearing away without initiating any further remarks. When she had finished I went out on to the Common and looked for the pond where I had talked with Ginger Stott. I found it after a time, and then I began to gather up the threads I had dropped. It all came back to me, little by little. I remembered that talk I had had with him, his very gestures; I remembered how he had spoken of habits, or the necessity for the lack of them, and that took me back to the scene in the British Museum Reading-Room, and to my theory. I was suddenly alive to that old interest again. I got up and walked eagerly in the direction of Mrs. Stott's cottage. CHAPTER XIV THE INCIPIENCE OF MY SUBJECTION TO THE WONDER I Victor Stott was in his eighth year when I met him for the third time. I must have stayed longer than I imagined by the pond on the Common, for Mrs. Stott and her son had had tea, and the boy was preparing to go out. He stopped when he saw me coming; an unprecedented mark of recognition, so I have since learned.