Lanyard faltered and worked his hands together, his features wrung, haunted eyes reflecting the enigma of the embers which held their stare. And with a gesture of quick sympathy, the woman sat forward to screen him. But these others seemed to be completely preoccupied with their own hilarious concerns; and the racket of congenial voices they raised must have prevented their overhearing anything of Lanyard's confession when at length he resumed.
"Up to that time," he said slowly, "I had hardly questioned the assumption that Morphew deliberately had schemed to victimize me . . . But then, while I was creeping away from that house, quite literally like a thief in the night—once upon the roof, again when I stood in the kitchen-yard, looking back at the blank rear windows, and yet again while stumbling through that foundation pit beyond the fence—at every stage of that journey I knew a feeling as of doing something I had done before, repeating the identical moves I had made at another time, upon an occasion strangely forgotten . . ."
"Well?" the woman in cool amusement asked.
"Well!"—his smile sketched a wistful expression of bewilderment—"I do not know, perhaps it was true, perhaps . . ."
Careless whether they were observed, the woman leaned forward and lightly covered one of his hands with her own. "Poor dear!" she cried, with a thrill of fond laughter—"to let himself be so tormented by a sensation such as everybody has at times."
"Everybody?" he iterated in a stare.
"It happens to us all—has it never happened to you before?—a phenomenon so common the psychologists have a special name for it. What do they call it? reflex memory? Something of the sort, I forget . . . One only needs a new scene and a mood especially susceptible to impressions of strangeness or beauty—and all at once one feels quite sure one has visited that very spot in some previous existence. Precisely that happened to you, last night, my Michael, in your super-excited state of mind, worried by ignorance of the truth about the stolen property in your possession. . . . Take my word for it."
"You believe that?" he insisted—"truly?"
"Truly, my dear."
"You don't think I could possibly—?"