"I could remember dimly right back to when I was leaving the office in Old Serjeants' Inn with the bundle of bank-notes to go to the bank. Then all of a sudden it would seem I forgot all about my past and became, as you insist, myself at twenty. I went to the Charing Cross Hotel, where I had already, it would seem, hired rooms for myself, and where I had directed new clothes to be sent, and then I went to Paris."
"This is most important," said Oppenshaw. "You had already hired rooms for yourself and ordered clothes. Those acts must have been committed before the great change came on you, and of course without your knowledge."
"They must. Also the act of drawing the ten thousand from the bank."
"The concealed other self must have been working like a mole in the dark for some days at least," said Oppenshaw, "utterly without your knowledge."
"Utterly."
"Then having prepared in a vague sort of way a means for enjoying itself, it burst out; it was like a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis—excuse the simile."
"Something like that."
"So far so good. Well, now, when you came to your old self in Paris, what did you do?"
"I came back to London, of course."
"But surely your sudden disappearance must have caused alarm? Why, it would have been in the papers."