ht before him with unseeing eyes. No
artist was ever able to seize the inner and the outer verity of that
round, pink baby face, filled with the power of a weighty personality
and a penetrating mind. Stewart marked him in that minute, sagacity and
benevolence, as it were, silently radiating from him; and the younger
man in his need turned to the wise Master, the paternal friend whose
counsels had done so much to set his young feet in the way of success.

When Stewart found himself in the Master's study, the study so familiar
to his youth, with its windows looking out on the garden quadrangle, and
saw the great little man himself seated before him at the writing-table,
he marvelled at the temerity that had brought him there to speak on such
a theme. But the cup was poured and had to be drunk. The Master left him
to begin. He sat with a plump hand on each plump knee, and regarded his
old pupil with silent benevolence.

"I've come to see you, Master," said Stewart, "because I feel very
bewildered, very helpless, in a matter which touches my wife even more
than myself. You were so kind about my marriage, and you have always
been good to her as well as to me."

"Miss Flaxman was a nice young lady," squeaked the Master. "I knew you
married wisely."

"Something happened shortly before we were engaged which she--we didn't
quite grasp--its importance, I mean," Stewart began. He then spoke of
those periodical lapses of memory in his wife which he had come to see
involved real and extraordinary variations in her character--a change,
in fact, of personality. He mentioned their futile visits to
Norton-Smith, the brain and nerve specialist. The Master heard him
without either moving or interrupting. When he had done there was a
silence. At length the Master said:

"I suspect we don't understand women."

"Perhaps not. But, Master, haven't you yourself noticed a great
difference in my wife at various times?"

"Not more than I feel in myself--not of another character, that is. We
live among men; we live among men who, generally speaking, know nothing
about women. That's why women appear to us strange and unnatural. Your
wife's quite normal, really."

"But the memory alone, surely--"

"That's made you nervous; but I've known cases not far different. You
remember meeting Sir Henry Milwood here? When I knew him he was a young
clergyman. He had an illness; forgot all about his clerical life, and
went sheep-farming in Australia, w