For suppose that he had no choice but to go back and reopen the closed book of his life, and that nothing that Julia or I could do would stop him. Whether in that case was the better: to live as it were day by day and hour and hour, with joy and grief experienced at their highest pitch, or to continue to possess to the full this unique and double knowledge, of a past that had been a future and of a future that was once more a past? To put it in another form, since he must do this Widdershins Walk, was it better for him to know he was doing it, or to do it knowing as little as possible about it? Or, in its simplest form of all, would he be happier with or without a memory of any kind? * * * * * I said good night to him at the door of his room and closed it behind me. I had not taken more than a couple of steps when I heard him softly lock it. I went down to Julia in the drawing-room. Even on a warm summer's evening, when the windows stand wide open, I like a wood fire. Outside the heavens were a beauteous pink glow, with one amber star. The trout were rising for their evening meal, and a sedge-warbler sang short sweet phrases. From time to time a moorhen scuttered along the surface of the pond, and the smell of night-flowering tobacco floated into the quiet room. But Julia had no wish to go out. Into a pair of my sister's slippers she had thrust her worsted-clad feet, and she was toasting her toes and smiling into the fire. "Is that window too much for you?" I asked. "No." "Then put this shawl over your shoulders. You'll have hot milk to go to bed with." "Thank you, George." "And now," I said, drawing up my chair opposite to her, "tell me what's happened since Wednesday." She mused. "Happened to him?" "I want to know _all_ that you did. Did you go to him?" "No. He turned up at the Boltons this morning and dragged me out, exactly as he said." "But----" "Oh, I'd sent him a note." "Ah! I wondered.... What did you say?" "It was only a couple of lines. I forget what the exact words were. I merely said that I shouldn't be in the least afraid of anything, and that anyway I hadn't a dog to set at him. Just that. Nothing else. I wrote it in the Museum after you'd gone." "And that fetched him round?" "Yes." "Well, what did he say?" She hesitated. "That's just it, George. He hasn't even referred to it." "What, not in any way?" "Not in any way." "He just came into the Boltons as if nothing had happened, and he's talked all day as if nothing had happened?" "That's exactly it." "He's not mentioned his book?" "Only what you heard at lunch." "He is writing it?" "One would gather so. You know as much about it as I do." I gazed into the fire. A louder splash came from the pond--one of the three-pound rainbows. Julia resumed of her own accord.