‘You mean you have really known me. Then you must have met me somewhere before to-day!’ He tried to recall the occasion, but without success.
‘It was not here,’ Graham went on slowly, gravely. ‘I—I can’t tell you.’ He looked with a wistful, questioning helplessness into his companion’s face. ‘If I were to tell you, should you laugh?’
‘I don’t know. At any rate you want to tell me?’
‘Yes, I want to.’
‘Well, fire away then.’
‘It is something that is rather hard for me to say.... It will make you think me so childish, so silly.... You see you couldn’t very well believe it unless—unless you yourself were to remember, just as I do—unless it were true——’
Brocklehurst glanced at him quickly. ‘Remember having seen you somewhere? But I may easily have forgotten. As a matter of fact I have forgotten—so now.’
‘Yes—so now.... But I know you, for all that—the sound of your voice even, the way you speak and stand there.’
‘I only came back this morning. I do not think you were here before Christmas.’