"Don't you know it yourself?" he asked very kindly.
"No." That was true at any rate. "How did you find it out?"
"From the card in your trousers' pocket. You are the only survivor from the Burgen and had a very narrow escape. Even most of your clothes were blown off you. Doesn't anything I say suggest anything to you?"
I lay as if pondering this solemnly. "It's all so—so strange," I muttered, putting my hand to my head. "So—so——" and I left it at that; and he went away, after giving me one more item of valuable information—that my belt which contained my money had also been saved.
I played that lost memory for all it was worth and with gorgeous success. I became a "case" for the doctors who trotted along to interview me as a sort of interesting freak and held learned discussions over me. All this gave me such ample practice that I became perfect in the part.
But there was a fly in the amber. As the only survivor from the Burgen the Dutch authorities regarded me as a person of quite considerable importance. Officials came to visit me, pouring in regular broadsides of questions; and as they got no satisfaction, and the doctors differed about my recovering my memory, the official verdict was that I should remain in Rotterdam until I did recover it.
This threatened complications; but I had no intention to remain, so I prepared to get away, sent out for a ready-made suit of clothes—ye gods, what a beautiful misfit!—and was going to leave the hospital to see what I could do at the German Embassy about a passport, when my luck propeller snapped and I saw myself nose-diving to the ground.
A nurse brought me a card and said some one was waiting to see me in the doctor's room. The card told me it was a certain Herr Heinrich Hoffnung, 480b, Ugenplatz, Berlin!
It was just rotten luck, for it meant the collapse of the Lassen show. The instant he clapped eyes on me he'd know I wasn't the real Simon Pure; and it might be the dickens of a job to get across the frontier.
As I thought of Nessa and what the delay might mean to her, I was mad. But I couldn't shirk the meeting; so after giving him time to learn all about my "case" from the doctor, I went down, wondering what ill wind had blown the fellow to Rotterdam at such a moment, and what the dickens would happen when I was no longer Lassen.