'You mean Buller and Springfield? I have told you what I think about Buller; as for Springfield, he's a bad man. Besides, if I am poor, is he not poor, too? He's only a captain.'
'Buller tells me he's the heir to a peerage,' I replied, 'and that when somebody dies he will come into pots of money. And whatever else you may think about him, he is a strong man, capable and determined. If you are right about him, and you think there's going to be a battle royal between you two, you will have a dangerous enemy, an enemy who will stop at nothing. But that is not all. The greatest difficulty has not yet been mentioned.'
'What is that?'
I hesitated before replying. I felt I was going to be cruel, and yet I could not help it.
'You have no right to ask any woman to be your wife,' I urged—'least of all a woman whom you love as you say you love Lorna Bolivick.'
'Why?' and there was a tone of anxiety in his voice.
'Because you don't know who you are, or what you are. You are, I should judge, a man thirty years of age. What your history has been you don't know. Possibly you have a wife somewhere.'
I was sorry the moment I had uttered the words, for he gave a cry almost amounting to agony.
'No, no,' he gasped, 'not that!'
'You don't know,' I said; 'the past is an utter blank to you; you have no recollection of anything which happened before you lost your memory, and——'