‘Do you?’ said Mrs Lawford’s voice. He poised himself, as if it were, on the monolithic stability of his legs. ‘Eh?’ he said. Mr Bethany sat down at the table. ‘I rather feared some such temporary breakdown as this, Danton. I think I foresaw it. And now, just while we are all three alone here together in friendly conclave, wouldn’t it be as well, don’t you think, to confront ourselves with the difficulties? I know—we all know, that that poor half-demented creature _is_ Arthur Lawford. This morning he was as sane, as lucid as I hope I am now. An awful calamity has suddenly fallen upon him—this change. I own frankly at the first sheer shock it staggered me as I think for the moment it has staggered you. But when I had seen the poor fellow face to face, heard him talk, and watched him there upstairs in the silence stir and awake and come up again to his trouble out of his sleep. I had no more doubt in my own mind and heart that he was he than I have in my mind that I—am I. We do in some mysterious way, you’ll own at once, grow so accustomed, so inured, if you like, to each other’s faces (masks though they be) that we hardly realise we see them when we are speaking together. And yet the slightest, the most infinitesimal change is instantly apparent.’ ‘Oh yes, Vicar; but you see—’ Mr Bethany raised a small lean hand: ‘One moment, please. I have heard Lawford’s own account. Conscious or unconscious, he has been through some terrific strain, some such awful conflict with the unseen powers that we—thank God!—have only read about, and never perhaps, until death is upon us, shall witness for ourselves. What more likely, more inevitable than that such a thing should leave its scar, its cloud, its masking shadow?—call it what you will. A smile can turn a face we dread into a face we’d die for. Some experience, which would be nothing but a hideous cruelty and outrage to ask too closely about—one, perhaps, which he could, even if he would, poor fellow, give no account of—has put him temporarily at the world’s mercy. They made him a nine days’ wonder, a byword. And that, my dear Danton, is just where we come in. We know the man himself; and it is to be our privilege to act as a buffer-state, to be intermediaries between him and the rest of this deadly, craving, sheepish world—for the time being; oh yes, just for the time being. Other and keener and more knowledgeable minds than mine or yours will some day bring him back to us again. We don’t attempt to explain; we can’t. We simply believe.’ But Danton merely continued to stare, as if into the quiet of an aquarium. ‘My dear good Danton,’ persisted Mr Bethany with cherubic patience, ‘how old are you?’ ‘I don’t see quite...’ smiled Danton with recovered ease, and rapidly mobilising forces. ‘Excuse the confidence, Mrs Lawford, I’m forty-three.’