rched out to meet him.

"Influenza, of course?" we asked simultaneously.

There is a limit to the time which one man may spend in talking to
another about his own influenza; and presently, as we paced the sands,
I felt that Laider had passed this limit. I wondered that he didn't
break off and thank me now for my letter. He must have read it. He
ought to have thanked me for it at once. It was a very good letter, a
remarkable letter. But surely he wasn't waiting to answer it by post?
His silence about it gave me the absurd sense of having taken a
liberty, confound him! He was evidently ill at ease while he talked.
But it wasn't for me to help him out of his difficulty, whatever that
might be. It was for him to remove the strain imposed on myself.

Abruptly, after a long pause, he did now manage to say:

"It was--very good of you to--to write me that letter." He told me he
had only just got it, and he drifted away into otiose explanations of
this fact. I thought he might at least say it was a remarkable letter;
and you can imagine my annoyance when he said, after another interval,
"I was very much touched indeed." I had wished to be convincing, not
touching. I can't bear to be called touching.

"Don't you," I asked, "think it IS quite possible that your brain
invented all those memories of what--what happened before that
accident?"

He drew a sharp sigh.

"You make me feel very guilty."

"That's exactly what I tried to make you NOT feel!"

"I know, yes. That's why I feel so guilty."

We had paused in our walk. He stood nervously prodding the hard wet
sand with his walking-stick.

"In a way," he said, "your theory was quite right. But--it didn't go
far enough. It's not only possible, it's a fact, that I didn't see
those signs in those hands. I never examined those hands. They
weren't there. _I_ wasn't there. I haven't an uncle in Hampshire,
even. I never had."

I, too, prodded the sand.

"Well," I said at length, "I do feel rather a fool."

"I've no right even to beg your pardon, but--''

"Oh, I'm not vexed. Only--I rather wish you hadn't told me this."

"I wish I hadn't had to. It was your kindness, you see, that forced
me. By trying to take an imaginary load off my conscience, you laid a
very real one on it."

"I'm sorry. But you, of your own free will, you know, exposed your
conscience to me last year. I don't yet quite understand why you did
that."

"No, of course not. I