It was impossible to believe that even unconsciously he was lying. I remembered his own trouble and unbelief when it had first occurred to him that this astounding development might lie ahead. Wistfully he had put it aside as too dazzling to be entertained. "I suppose that's too much to expect," he had sighed as he had put it from him. But now, unless he was lying to me, to Jennie, and to himself, he certainly seemed to have the proof of it. His face had been puzzled candour itself when I had put my sudden questions: Had he and I met before, and did he know a Miss Oliphant? Vaguely he remembered a pond, vaguely a Miss Oliphant in England; and to-morrow he was not going to remember either. My hazardous surmise as I had watched the shirley poppies was justified, my fears for the breaking-up of his faculties groundless. This was not the break-up, but the very confirmation of those faculties, the complete washing-out of everything _not_ inherent in himself. What next happened in the night would be what happens to every one of us every night--the gentle and beautiful small forward step to age. He was all but at the maximum of his unassisted, unhindered power, a white page on which to write anew. And what a lovely manuscript might it not now be made! His schooling, the rudiments he had formerly acquired up to the age of sixteen, he would probably retain; but thereafter his life dated from a certain moment when, by the upcast glow of the headlights of a French car, he had seen Jennie Aird's eyes looking into his. He even spoke as if his talk with me that night by Le Port gap had been the beginning of his confidence in me. Not a suspicion did he seem to have that he had made similar confidences before, in his rooms in Cambridge Circus, in that loft over a South Kensington mews. That meeting of eyes across the car--that swift "Who was that with you in the garden, George?"--his wily shepherding of me into the Dinard Bazaar--his surreptitious meetings with her, and his last crowning escapade--these made up the whole history of his re-created life. Within this perfect period he had forgotten nothing ... but yes, he had forgotten one thing. This was his promise to me. And very likely he had not forgotten that at all. The chances were that he had knowingly and deliberately broken his word. And what of it? Who was I to have extorted it from him? Could I reproach him with that--now? Is the law so hard? Shall we add to the tortures of Tantalus the unbinding of his hands, and forbid him to seize the fruit he thirsts for? Let him cut the knot and take his joy! At the worst he had merely omitted to send me a note releasing himself. And should I speak of that--now?