"Norton-Smith!" exclaimed Tims. "What is the good? Englishmen are all right when it's a question of filling up the map of Africa, but they're no good on the dark continent of ourselves. They're cowards. That's what's the matter with them. Don't go to Norton-Smith."
Stewart made an effectual effort to overcome his irritation. He ought to have known better than to turn to an oddity like Tims for advice and sympathy.
"Whom ought I to go to, then?" he asked, good-humoredly, and looking particularly long as he rose from the depths of the low wicker chair. "A medicine-man with horns and a rattle?"
"Well," returned Tims with deliberation, pulling on a pair of thread gloves, "I dare say he could teach Norton-Smith a thing or two. Mind you, I'm not talking spiritualistic rot; I'm talking scientific facts, which every one knows except the English scientific men, who keep on clapping their glass to the blind eye like a lot of clock-work Nelsons. The effects of hypnotism are as much facts as the effects of a bottle of whiskey. But Milly's case is different. In my opinion she's developed an independent double personality. It's an inconvenient state of things, but I don't suppose it'll last forever. One or the other will get stronger and 'hold the fort.' But it's rather a bad business anyhow." Tims paused and sighed, drawing on the other glove. "I'm—I'm fond of them both myself, and I expect you'll feel the same, when you see the difference."
Ian laughed awkwardly, his brown eyes fixed scrutinizingly upon her.
"So long as the fort holds somebody, I sha'n't worry," he said, lightly.
They went out, and as he led his own bicycle towards the upper track, Tims spun down the steep drive, and, turning into the lane, kissed her hand to him in farewell from under the brim of her perennially crooked hat.
"That Timson girl's more than queer," he mused to himself, going on. "There's a streak of real insanity in her. I'm afraid it's not been good for a highly strung creature like Mildred to see so much of her; and why on earth did she?"
He tried to clear his mind of Tims's fantastic suggestions; of everything, indeed, except the freshness of the air rushing past him, the beauty of the wide view, steeped in the romance of distance. But memory, that strange, recalcitrant, mechanical slave of ours, kept diving, without connivance of his, into the recesses of the past twenty months of his life, and presenting to him unsolicited, circumstances, experiences, which he had thrust away unclassified—his own surprise, almost perplexity, when Mildred had brought him work for the first time after her illness that autumn Term before last; his disappointment and even boredom in his engagement and the first three weeks of his marriage; then the change in his own feelings after her long sleep at the Hôtel du Chalet; besides a score of disquieting trifles which meant nothing till they were strung on a thread. He felt himself beginning to be infected with Flora Timson's mania against his will, against his sober judgment; and he spun down Bagley Hill at a runaway speed, only saved by a miracle from collision with a cart which emerged from Hincksey Lane at the jolting pace with which the rustic pursues his undeviating course.