Of the interval between taking the train at St.-Pierre, probably to go southward toward Bordeaux, and my waking on board the _Auvergne_ I have as yet only such fragments of memory as one retains of dreams. Even that which stands out is shadowy, uncertain, evanescent. It is without context. No one fragment is substantial enough for me to be sure of it as pertaining to a fact. Facts began for me anew at the instant when I opened my eyes in the cabin and saw Drinkwater shaving. "Funny, isn’t it?" Wolf did not make this observation till some minutes after I had ceased. During the interval of silence, as during the half-hour of my narrative, his grin played on me like a searchlight. As I have already said, I didn’t resent this because of knowing his smile to be a kind of nervous rictus of the lips which he was no longer able to control; and yet the silly comment nettled me. "What’s funny about it?" I asked, coldly. "Oh, nothing! Just—just the whole thing." "If you think the whole thing’s funny—" "Oh no, not in that sense, not comic." "What is it then?" "Nothing—nothing! I was only wondering—" But I didn’t find out what Wolf was wondering till later. In the mean while I gave him a brief account of my doings in New York, leading up to the day when Alice Mountney had "discovered" me. When I came to that he rose, eying me all over as he had done at first. "That’s a queer kind of rig—" he began, with his everlasting jocularity. "It’s the kind of rig I’ve been wearing," I replied, sharply. "Good enough for its purpose. I shall get something else as soon as I’ve had time to go to the tailor." "I’d go soon," was his only remark, as he left me to repeat to Vio what he could remember of my tale. *CHAPTER VIII* It was after lunch before I was summoned to the telephone, to hear Wolf’s voice at the other end. Vio would see me at three. I was to understand that my being alive had been a shock to her, and therefore all this ceremonial! At a quarter to three I started to walk across the Common to the old Soames house on Beacon Hill. It occurred to me then that if for the living it is a strange sensation when the dead come back, for the dead it is a stranger sensation still. Not till I set out on this errand had I understood how dead I had been. I had been dead and buried; I had been mourned for and forgotten; Vio had finished her grieving and returned to every-day life. For anything I knew, she might be contemplating remarriage. Alice Mountney had said that when people were dead it was better for them to stay dead; and I began to fear it was.