For if a normal man like my friend at the counter was struck by the changes of the past five years, how must they strike a man who had gone through an experience so utterly abnormal as that of Derwent Rose? Change is the normal condition of all things; the human mind is marvellously able to adapt itself to altered circumstances in a week, a day, an hour; memories lose their fresh edge, novelties amuse and give way to newer novelties still. But all this is only for men who march forward with their fellows. For the man who marches backwards all is turned round. The memories stir and revive and bloom again, the forgotten is re-remembered, laid ghosts begin to walk. The dulled brass edges of staircases become bright again with the rubbing of light and frail and vanished feet, recessed sofas in upper rooms thrill and rustle with whispers and frou-frou and laughter again. Doubtless the living, 1920 successors of those ghosts were to be found elsewhere, but unless I sought Derry in 1910 I knew not where to begin to look for him. Musingly I descended the stairs and walked slowly back towards the Criterion again. I no longer watched faces. The whole thing seemed hopeless. I had about as much chance of finding Derwent Rose in London as I had of catching one given drop of a summer shower. And then, in that very moment, I saw him. * * * * * Or rather it was the hansom that I saw first. It had just started forward with the release of the traffic opposite Drew's, at the top of Lower Regent Street. Now a hansom in Piccadilly Circus to-day is perhaps not the rarity that a sedan-chair would be; nevertheless hansoms are comparatively few, and therefore conspicuous. The padded leaves of this one were thrown back, and before I saw him I had already seen a white-sheathed ankle and a white satin slipper. Then he leaned forward for a moment. It was unmistakably he. The hansom passed along with the stream. Unmistakably he--and yet, mingled with the perfect familiarity, there was a change that I could not immediately analyse. Then (I am telling you what flashed instantaneously through my mind in that fraction of time before I had dashed after him)--then I had it! Familiar, yet not altogether familiar! Of course!---- _His beard!_ At one time in the past Derwent Rose had worn a beard, the softest sprouting of curling golden-brown. In certain lights it had been little more than a glint that had scarcely hid the contours beneath, and it had made him the living image of Du Maurier's drawings of Peter Ibbetson. He now had that young beard again, and he and it and the hansom with the white satin slippers in it had disappeared behind a bus opposite Swan and Edgar's.