Lawford sat drawn up, staring at his companion’s face in an intense and helpless silence. His mouth opened but no words came. ‘Of course,’ began Herbert again, ‘I don’t say there’s anything in it—except the—the mere coincidence,’ he paused and glanced out of the open casement beside him. ‘But there’s just one obvious question. Do you happen to know of any strain of French blood in your family?’ Lawford shut his eyes, even memory seemed to be forsaking him at last. ‘No,’ he said, after a long pause, ‘there’s a little Dutch, I think, on my mother’s side, but no French.’ ‘No Sabathier, then?’ said Herbert, smiling. ‘And then there’s another question—this change; is it really as complete as you suppose? Has it—please just warn me off if I am in the least intruding—has it been noticed?’ Lawford hesitated. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said slowly, ‘it has been noticed—my wife, a few friends.’ ‘Do you mind this infernal clatter?’ said Herbert, laying his fingers on the open casement. ‘No, no. And you think?’ ‘My dear fellow, I don’t think anything. It’s all the craziest conjecture. Stranger things even than this have happened. There are dozens here—in print. What are we human beings after all? Clay in the hands of the potter. Our bodies are merely an inheritance, packed tight and corded up. We have practically no control over their main functions. We can’t even replace a little finger-nail. And look at the faces of us—what atrocious mockeries most of them are of _any_ kind of image! But we know our bodies change—age, sickness, thought, passion, fatality. It proves they are amazingly plastic. And merely even as a theory it is not in the least untenable that by force of some violent convulsive effort from outside one’s body _might_ change. It answers with odd voluntariness to friend or foe, smile or snarl. As for what we call the laws of Nature, they are pure assumptions to-day, and may be nothing better than scrap-iron tomorrow. Good Heavens, Lawford, consider man’s abysmal impudence.’ He smoked on in silence for a moment. ‘You say you fell asleep down there?’ Lawford nodded. Herbert tapped his cigarette on the sill. ‘Just following up our ludicrous conjecture, you know,’ he remarked musingly, ‘it wasn’t such a bad opportunity for the poor chap.’ ‘But surely,’ said Lawford, speaking as it were out of a dream of candle-light and reverberating sound and clearest darkness, towards this strange deliberate phantom with the unruffled clear-cut features—‘surely then, in that case, he is here now? And yet, on my word of honour, though every friend I ever had in the world should deny it, I am the same. Memory stretches back clear and sound to my childhood. I can see myself with extraordinary lucidity, how I think, my motives and all that; and in spite of these voices that I seem to hear, and this peculiar kind of longing to break away, as it were, just to press on—it is I,—I myself, that am speaking to you now out of this—this mask.’