hysician; but no, there was something subtly
un-professional about him: I became sure that his constancy was
gratuitous, and his radiance real. And one day, I know not how, there
dawned on me a suspicion that he was--who?--some one I had known--some
writer--what's-his-name--something with an M--Maltby--Hilary Maltby of
the long-ago!

At sight of him on the morrow this suspicion hardened almost to
certainty. I wished I could meet him alone and ask him if I were not
right, and what he had been doing all these years, and why he had left
England. He was always with the old lady. It was only on my last day in
Lucca that my chance came.

I had just lunched, and was seated on a comfortable bench outside my
hotel, with a cup of coffee on the table before me, gazing across the
faded old sunny piazza and wondering what to do with my last afternoon.
It was then that I espied yonder the back of the putative Maltby. I
hastened forth to him. He was buying some pink roses, a great bunch of
them, from a market-woman under an umbrella. He looked very blank, he
flushed greatly, when I ventured to accost him. He admitted that his
name was Hilary Maltby. I told him my own name, and by degrees he
remembered me. He apologised for his confusion. He explained that he had
not talked English, had not talked to an Englishman, 'for--oh, hundreds
of years.' He said that he had, in the course of his long residence in
Lucca, seen two or three people whom he had known in England, but that
none of them had recognised him. He accepted (but as though he were
embarking on the oddest adventure in the world) my invitation that
he should come and sit down and take coffee with me. He laughed with
pleasure and surprise at finding that he could still speak his native
tongue quite fluently and idiomatically. 'I know absolutely nothing,' he
said, 'about England nowadays--except from stray references to it in the
Corriere della Sera; nor did he show the faintest desire that I should
enlighten him. 'England,' he mused, '--how it all comes back to me!'

'But not you to it?'

'Ah, no indeed,' he said gravely, looking at the roses which he had laid
carefully on the marble table. 'I am the happiest of men.'

He sipped his coffee, and stared out across the piazza, out beyond it
into the past.

'I am the happiest of men,' he repeated. I plied him with the spur of
silence.

'And I owe it all to having once yielded to a bad impulse. Absurd, the
threads our destini