“I don’t like it, Jack! I won’t promise! Right is right!”
“In this case it is wrong! Come!”
He led her back to the drawing-room. Their visitor rose politely from his chair.
“Don’t get up,” said Satterthwaite. “Your wife is coming along.”
“Thank you,” he replied. “It is very good of you to take so much trouble. I shall be quite all right when my wife arrives to take charge of me.” He smiled in half-serious self-depreciation.
The three of them sat down. The Durham personality was amiably loquacious. The young woman watched him speechlessly, noting, with an icy chill at her heart, a hundred little familiarities of gesture as he sat in that old familiar chair all unconscious of any previous presence in it.
“I’m very muddled still,” he confided. “I can’t remember anything since being in that street-car. The row, whatever it was, is a complete blank to me—I can’t imagine even how I got into this street. Extraordinary, isn’t it?”
“Very,” agreed Satterthwaite, coolly.
“It’s not the first time I’ve had a lapse of memory like this,” he went on. “A shock does it. I went through the war—and—would you believe it?—I woke up one day in hospital utterly unable to remember anything about myself except that my name was Durham! I couldn’t remember where I came from—nor whether I had any relatives—couldn’t remember anything except just my name. And—this is the strange part of it—I never have remembered. They discharged me from hospital—shell-shock it was—and I just started life afresh.” He smiled confidently at the young woman. “I sometimes wonder whether I was married before, madam—but I hope not. I couldn’t part with the wife I’ve got. I married her eighteen months ago and she’s everything to me. I don’t think there’s another woman like her in the world! And she feels the same about me. That’s the right sort of married life, isn’t it?”