That on Wednesday, June 30th, In a pathetic little jotting of Julia had been scheming to the same date, that he feared make herself his secretary. he would never write his book, that he was "getting too young for it," but that he intended to attempt it at all costs. That on the following Friday That he now doubted whether and Saturday, at my house, what he had at first thought he had been vivid, momentary, to be will-power had really intense. been that at all; in fact, that the real effort of will would have been, not to put his work out of his head for a couple of days, _but to remember it_. At this point I began to grow excited. It seemed to me that at last I began to see light. I had taken him step by step from the starting-point of June 8th to the evening of Saturday, July 3rd, and the reason I had not gone beyond that date was that the diary itself stopped there. Its last entry was the one I have just given--that he feared he had been mistaken in supposing that will-power had had anything whatever to do with that stolen week-end's holiday. Oh, had there but been one, one single entry dated Sunday, July 4th! For if it was possible for him to shuffle off four years in what I may call an ordinary night, what was _im_possible after an experience as stupefying as had been his on the night of Saturday-Sunday? And yet in appearance it had not altered him. I had spent practically the whole of Sunday with him, and there had been nothing to indicate that he was not still twenty-nine. His manner, it is true, had been alternately jumpy and morose, but that might have been the mere vague pull of his Wanderjahre. Therefore it looked as if that mad onslaught of Julia's on his stability had passed him over after all. _Ah, but wait a moment!..._ I sat up at my desk, vociferating the words aloud. Were we at such a dead end after all? Perhaps not.... And first of all I remembered that question I had asked him about the flash-lamp as he had stood behind the screen of rugosa roses on the Sunday afternoon. "Has there been a moment since yesterday when that lamp has been held as close as it could be held?" Again I saw his sudden pallor. Again I felt his clutch on my shoulder, again heard his faint "George--I've been trying to remember ... the lamp ... very close ... touching ... one intense brilliant spot ... but I swear I never moved it ... it was as if somebody took the torch out of my hand ... somebody meddled in my life...."