alone, without having the sense or power to see or to acknowledge
it. All he had said had been the mere flotsam of the moment, and
now it stood stark and irrevocable between himself and the past.

He sat down dazed and stupid. Again and again a struggling
recollection tried to obtrude itself; again and again he beat it
back. And rather for something to distract his attention than for
any real interest or enlightenment he might find in its pages, he
took out the grimy dog's-eared book that Herbert had given him,
and turned slowly over the leaves till he came to Sabathier once
more. Snatches of remembrance of their long talk returned to him,
but just as that dark, water-haunted house had seemed to banish
remembrance and the reality of the room in which he now sat, and
of the old familiar life; so now the house, the faces of
yesterday seemed in their turn unreal, almost spectral, and the
thick print on the smudgy page no more significant than a story
one reads and throws away.

But a moment's comparison in the glass of the two faces side by
side suddenly sharpened his attention--the resemblance was so
oddly arresting, and yet, and yet, so curiously inconclusive.
There was then something of the stolid old Saxon left, he
thought. Or had it been regained? Which was it? Not merely the
complexity of the question, but a half-conscious distaste of
attempting to face it, set him reading very slowly and
laboriously, for his French was little more than fragmentary
recollection, the first few pages of the life of this buried
Sabathier. But with a disinclination almost amounting to aversion
he made very slow progress. Many of the words were meaningless to
him, and every other moment he found himself listening with