Colonel Kenwynton was trembling like a leaf. A chill keener than the cold had set his heart a-quiver. “Forgotten,” he echoed in a vague fright. “Forgotten—impossible!”
The contradiction seemed to restore Treherne—not so much that it aroused the instinct of contention as the determination to set himself right in the eyes of his old commander.
“Do you know, Colonel, where I have been these forty years?” he demanded, quietly.
“I thought, in Paradise, dear old boy. I often asked, but could never hear a word.”
Wherever he had been it was evident he had not been happy there. The trembling clasp of Colonel Kenwynton’s arm on his shoulder brought the younger man’s face down on the soft old wrinkled neck. But now there were no tears.
“I have been at Glenrose.”
The words came from between set teeth, in the merest thread of a voice.
“Glenrose?” Colonel Kenwynton was aware that there was a significance in the reply which he had not grasped. “A beautiful little town, I am told, not far from Caxton, and growing quite into commercial importance,” he said, glibly, his instinct of courtesy and compliment galvanically astir.
“Oh, horrible! Horrible!” Hugh Treherne cried, poignantly. “Do you wonder now that I have forgotten? I can only wonder that I remember anything. They pretend that it was the wound at Franklin—the injury to the medulla substance.”
“Hugh! Hugh!” the old Colonel was near to falling into the marshy slough at his feet. “You don’t mean—you can’t mean—the—asylum—the private sanatorium for the insane. Oh, my poor boy, my poor boy. Wait, wait, give me your hand, I shall fall, wait, wait.”