"Lady Alice Brooke—daughter of the Lord Courtleroy, who died the other day," was the reply.
"Could you give me her address?"
"No; and I don't think that if I could it would be of any use to you. She is leaving England, I believe. If you want work or help, why don't you speak to Mr. Kenyon? He's the gentleman to find both for you—Mr. Maurice Kenyon."
"Which is Mr. Kenyon?"
"There—he's just passing through the next ward; shall I speak to him for you?"
"No, thank you: I don't want anything from him: I only wanted the lady's name," said John Smith, in a dogged sullen kind of way, which made the whitecapped nurse look at him suspiciously.
"Brooke!—Kenyon?"—How oddly familiar the names seemed to him! Of course they were not very uncommon names; but there was a distinct familiarity about them which had nothing to do with the names themselves, as if they had some connection with his own history and his own affairs.
He was discharged—"cured." He went out into the streets with half-a-crown in his pocket, and a fixed determination to know the truth, sooner or later, about himself. At the same time he had a great fear of letting any one know the extent of the blanks in his memory. He thought that people might shut him up in a madhouse if he told them that he could not recollect his own name. A certain amount of intellectual force and knowledge remained to him. He could read, and understand what he read. But of his own history he had absolutely no idea; and the only clue to it that he could find lay in those two names—Brooke and Kenyon.
Could he discover anything about the possessors of these names which would help him? He entered a shop where a Post Office Directory was to be found, and looked at Maurice Kenyon's name amongst the doctors. He found Mr. Kenyon's private address; but as yet it told him nothing. Woburn Place? Well, of course he had heard of Woburn Place, it was no wonder that he should know it so well; but the name told him nothing more.
He sat staring at it so long that the people of the shop grew impatient, and asked him to shut the book. He went away, and wandered about the streets, vaguely seeking for he knew not what. And after a time he bought a newspaper. Here again he found the name that had attracted his attention—the name of Kenyon. "Last appearance of Miss Kenyon at the Frivolity Theatre—this week only."