gether; I was
sufficiently intimate in the house to be treated without ceremony, and I
did not care for anybody's company until I could find what I was
searching for in the forgotten corners of my brain.

"Do not mind me," I answered, and I retired into the smoking-room, and
began to turn over the evening papers. How long I read I do not know,
nor whether the news of the day was more or less interesting and
credible than usual; I do not believe that an hour elapsed, either, for
an hour is a long time when a man is not interested in what he is doing,
and is trying to recall something to his mind. I cannot even tell why I
so longed to recollect the professor's face; I only remember that the
effort was intense, but wholly fruitless. I lay back in the deep
leathern easy-chair, and all sorts of visions flitted before my
half-closed eyes,--visions of good and visions of evil, visions of
yesterday and visions of long ago. Somehow I fell to thinking about the
lattice-covered door in the wall, and I caught myself wondering who had
been behind it when I passed; and then I laughed, for I had made up my
mind that it must have been Miss Chrysophrasia, who had entered the
drawing-room five minutes after I did. I sat staring at the fire. I was
conscious that some one had entered the room, and presently the
scratching of a match upon something rough roused me from my reverie. I
looked round, and saw Professor Cutter standing by the table.

It sometimes happens that a very slight thing will recall a very long
chain of circumstances; a look, the intonation of a word, the attitude
of a moment, will call up other looks and words and attitudes in quick
succession, until the chain is complete. So it happened to me, when I
saw the learned professor standing by the table, with a cigar in his
mouth, and his great gray eyes fixed upon me from behind his enormous
spectacles. I recognized the man, and the little I knew of him came back
to me.

The professor is one of the most learned specialists in neurology and
the study of the brain now living; he is, moreover, a famous
anthropologist. He began his career as a surgeon, and would have been
celebrated as an operator had he not one day inherited a private
fortune, which permitted him to abandon his surgical practice in favor
of a special branch for which he knew himself more particularly fitted.
So soon as I recalled the circumstances of our first meeting I realized
that I had been in his compan