"He _shall_ know what love is; If his question to me meant why should he get nothing anything, a wonder had happened out of his life?" Julia had to him not two hours ago. passionately cried. On his former pilgrimage he But was Love the wonder now? had not known Love. If so, it was Julia's gift when And it was a gift to Jennie. she had restored his innocence to him. But the position was inconceivable, not to be thought of. Experience such as never man had possessed lurked behind that simulacrum of beauty by my side. Young as he was, he was old enough to have been Jennie's father. He was, he still remained, the man who had written _The Hands of Esau_ and _An Ape in Hell_, the man for whom I had hunted in questionable London haunts, who had known to the full the sin and shame of his accumulated years. I knew, Julia knew, what contact with his ruinous uniqueness meant. How was it possible to permit such an error in nature as to allow him to fall in love with Jennie Aird? Yet if he had already done so, what was there to do? His voice sounded again softly by my side. "You haven't told me who that was with you in the garden," he said. "Let's finish with the other things first," I answered. "Oh, I'm tired of talking about myself, sir." "That's one of them. Why do you sometimes call me 'sir' and sometimes 'George'?" He gave a start. "Have I been doing that?" "Didn't you know?" I couldn't catch his reply. "When you were young I suppose you called older men 'sir'?" "Of course." "Do you think that at this moment you could repeat, say, half a page of _The Hands of Esau_?" (I had my reasons for choosing that book rather than another.) "I think so." "Will you try?" "Shall you know if I'm right?" "Near enough for the purpose, I think." He puckered his brows and fixed his eyes on the road. He began to recite. _The Hands of Esau_ had been written in or before 1912, and the year was now 1920. To remember even your own book textually eight years afterwards is something of a performance; but he was remembering, at nineteen, the words he had written at thirty-eight--a space of nearly twenty years. I stopped him, satisfied, but he himself immediately took up the running. "Of course I see what you're after, but I've done all that myself. Honour bright, that about the furniture was the first slip of the kind I've made. But I've made one discovery." "What's that?" "You're starting at the wrong end. That memory's all right. It's the other one I've sometimes wondered about." "Ah! The one you call your 'B' Memory! Do you mean--it sounds an odd way of putting it, but I suppose it's all right--do you mean you don't remember what sort of thing you'll be doing, say, next year?"