‘You think, I know,’ he persisted, ‘that I must be persuaded and cosseted and humoured. Yes, you do; it’s my poor old sanity that’s really in both your minds. Perhaps I am—not absolutely sound. Anyhow. I’ve been watching it in your looks at each other all the time. And I can never, never say, never tell you what you have done for me. But you see, after all, we did win through; I keep on telling myself that. So that now it’s purely from the most selfish and practical motives that I want you to be perfectly frank with me. I have to go back, you know; and some of them, one or two of my friends I mean, are not all on my side. Think of me as I was when you came into the room, three centuries ago, and you turned and looked, frowning at me in the candle-light; remember that and look at me now. What is the difference? Does it shock you? Does it make the whole world seem a trick, a sham? Does it simply sour your life to think such a thing possible? Oh, the hours I’ve spent gloating on Widderstone’s miserable mask of skin and bone, as I was saying to your brother only last night, and never knew until they shuffled me that the old self too was nothing better than a stifling suffocating mask.’ ‘But don’t you see,’ she argued softly, turning her face away a little, ‘you were a stranger then (though I certainly didn’t _mean_ to frown). And then a little while after we were, well, just human beings, shoulder to shoulder, and if friendship does not mean that, I don’t know what it does mean. And now, you are—well, just you: the you, you know, of three centuries ago! And if you mean to ask me whether at any precise moment I have been conscious that this you I am now speaking to was not the you of last night, or of that dark climb up the hill, why, it is simply frantic to think it could ever be necessary to say over and over again, No. But if you mean, Have you changed else? All I could answer is, Don’t we all change as we grow to know one another? What were just features, what just dingily represented one, as it were, is forgotten, or rather gets remembered. Of course, the first glimpse is the landscape under lightning as it were. But afterwards isn’t it surely like the alphabet to a child; what was first a queer angular scrawl becomes A, and is always ever after A, undistinguished, half-forgotten, yet standing at last for goodness knows what real wonderful things—or for just the dry bones of soulless words? Is that it?’ She stole a sidelong glance into his brooding face, leaning her head on her hand. ‘Yes, yes,’ came the rather dissatisfied reply. ‘I do agree; perfectly. But then, you see—I told you I was going to talk of nothing but myself—what did at first happen to me was something much worse, and, I suppose, something quite different from that.’