"But I tell you--I assure you the thing is so--I know nothing, or at least remember nothing of anything I knew of this world before I found myself in the darkness of night on the moorland above Sidderford." "Where did you learn the language then?" "I don't know. Only I tell you--But I haven't an atom of the sort of proof that would convince you." "And you really," said Crump, suddenly coming round upon him and looking into his eyes; "You really believe you were eternally in a kind of glorious heaven before then?" "I do," said the Angel. "Pshaw!" said Crump, and lit his pipe. He sat smoking, elbow on knee, for some time, and the Angel sat and watched him. Then his face grew less troubled. "It is just possible," he said to himself rather than to the Angel, and began another piece of silence. "You see;" he said, when that was finished. "There is such a thing as double personality.... A man sometimes forgets who he is and thinks he is someone else. Leaves home, friends, and everything, and leads a double life. There was a case in _Nature_ only a month or so ago. The man was sometimes English and right-handed, and sometimes Welsh and left-handed. When he was English he knew no Welsh, when he was Welsh he knew no English.... H'm." He turned suddenly on the Angel and said "Home!" He fancied he might revive in the Angel some latent memory of his lost youth. He went on "Dadda, Pappa, Daddy, Mammy, Pappy, Father, Dad, Governor, Old Boy, Mother, dear Mother, Ma, Mumsy.... No good? What are you laughing at?" "Nothing," said the Angel. "You surprised me a little,--that is all. A week ago I should have been puzzled by that vocabulary." For a minute Crump rebuked the Angel silently out of the corner of his eye. "You have such an ingenuous face. You almost force me to believe you. You are certainly not an ordinary lunatic. Your mind--except for your isolation from the past--seems balanced enough. I wish Nordau or Lombroso or some of these _Saltpetriere_ men could have a look at you. Down here one gets no practice worth speaking about in mental cases. There's one idiot--and he's just a damned idiot of an idiot--; all the rest are thoroughly sane people." "Possibly that accounts for their behaviour," said the Angel thoughtfully. "But to consider your general position here," said Crump, ignoring his comment, "I really regard you as a bad influence here. These fancies are contagious. It is not simply the Vicar. There is a man named Shine has caught the fad, and he has been in the drink for a week, off and on, and offering to fight anyone who says you are not an Angel. Then a man over at Sidderford is, I hear, affected with a kind of religious mania on the same tack. These things spread. There ought to be a quarantine in mischievous ideas. And I have heard another story...." "But what can I do?" said the Angel. "Suppose I am (quite unintentionally) doing mischief...." "You can leave the village," said Crump.