But as I sat there staring at him I began to see what he had gone through. Yet more disturbing than the consciousness of this was the thought of what it would eventually lead to, of what it was already leading to, in that broken wreck of a walking ghost, in that terror-hounded neurasthenic who had found a hole in his memory and had kept exploring it, feeling about it as one's tongue-tip keeps fathoming the cave of a lost tooth. "I went to a doctor, after she left me," the man in the chair was saying through his gaunt fingers as their tips pressed against his eye sockets. "He told me I had to sleep. He gave me trional and bromides and things, but I didn't seem able to assimilate them. Then he told me it was all in my own mind, that I only had to let myself relax. He told me to lie with my hands down at my sides, and sigh, to sigh just once. I lay all night as though I was in a coffin waiting for that sigh, fighting for it, praying for it. But it didn't come." "Of course it didn't," I told him, for I knew the feeling. "It never does, that way. You ought to have taken a couple of weeks in the Maine woods, or tried fishing up in Temagami, or gone off pounding a golf ball fifteen miles a day." Then I stopped and looked at him, for some subsidiary part of my brain must have been working even while I was talking. "By heaven, I believe that girl was mistaken!" "Mistaken?" he asked. "Yes, I don't believe any girl really knows her father's little tricks. I'd like to wager that Lockwood has the habit of tapping his thumb nail, sometimes, with what he may be holding in his other hand!" My dispirited friend looked up at me, a little disturbed by the vehemence of my outburst. "But what's that to me now? What good does it do me, even though he does tap his thumb?" "Can't you see that this is exploration work, like digging up a lost city? Can't you see that we've got to get down to at least one stone, and follow where that first sign leads?" I did my best to infect him with some trace of my sudden enthusiasm. I wanted to emotionalize him out of that dead flat monotone of indifference. I jumped to my feet and brought a declamative hand down on the corner of my library table. "I tell you it does you a lot of good. It's your life-buoy. It's the thing that's got to keep you afloat until your feet are on solid ground again." "I tried to feel that way about it once," was his listless response. "But it doesn't lead to anything. It only makes me decide I dreamed the whole thing." I stared down at him as he leaned wearily back in the heavy chair.