"Now, look here, Mr Gedge," I said, speaking for the first time with confidence. "If you were in my place, awakening suddenly to find that six years of your life had vanished in a single night, and that you were an entirely different person to that of twelve hours ago, what would you believe?" He looked at me with a somewhat sympathetic expression upon his thin features. "Well, I don't know what I should think." Then he added, "But surely such a thing can't be possible." "It is possible," I cried. "It has happened to me. I tell you that last night was six years ago." He turned from me, as though he considered further argument unavailing. My head reeled. What he had told me was utterly incredible. It seemed absolutely impossible that six whole years should have passed without my knowledge; that I should have entered upon a business of which I had previously known nothing; that I should have rapidly amassed a fortune; and, most of all, that I should have married that powdered and painted woman who had presented herself as my wife. Yet such were the unaccountable facts which this man Gedge asked me to believe. He saw that I was extremely dubious about the date, therefore he led me back to the library, where there hung upon the wall a large calendar, which quickly convinced me. Six; years had really elapsed since yesterday. In that vexing and perplexing present I reflected upon the puzzling past. That happy dinner with Mabel at the Boltons, the subsequent discoveries in that drawing-room where she had sat at the piano calmly playing; her soft words of tenderness, and the subsequent treachery of that dog-faced man Hickman, all passed before me with extraordinary vividness. Yet, in truth, all had happened long ago. Alas! I was not like other men. To the practical, level-headed man of affairs "To-day" may be sufficient, all-engrossing; but to the very large majority--a majority which, I believe, includes also many of the practical, the business of to-day admits of constant pleasant excursions into the golden mists of "long ago," and many happy flights to the rosy heights of "some day." Most of those who read this strange story of my life will remember with a melancholy affection, with a pain that is more soothing than many pleasures, the house wherein they were born, or at any rate the abode in which they passed the earlier years of their lives. The agonising griefs of childhood, the disappointments, the soul-racking terrors, mellowed by the gentle touch of passing years, have no sting for our mature sensibilities, but come back to us now with a pathos that is largely tinctured with amusement. I stood there reviewing the past, puzzled, utterly unable to account for it. Age, the iconoclast, had shattered most of the airy idols which my youth had set up in honour of itself. I had lost six of the most precious years of my life--years that I had not lived.