"Confide away then."
"All right, I will. I am as pleased as I feel sure you must be, though you don't show it, at the result of your idea."
"Pleased!" echoed Brooke. "Pleased! ... Great Heaven! Pleased, are you? But then, you see, I am not you. Bishop, I know every line of her face, every tone of her voice, though I never heard but one in the old days! I know her as a man knows the land where he was born; and she could sit looking full at me across the table, and not know she had ever seen me! ... Man! How have I come through it?"
"Excellently. I don't understand you. Surely it is what you were hoping for, planning for—complete non-recognition? What would have happened if she had known you? You heard what she said to me about you?"
"Every word;" his voice sank to a despairing whisper.
"She is at least consistent," said Mayne.
An inarticulate murmur of assent.
"I don't think the non-recognition wonderful," went on Mayne. "You see, she never thought about you, or even looked at you attentively in old days. And think what you were like then! Not only the outer man has changed. Remember that I myself, when first I saw you without your beard, and without your slouch, and without your oaths—in your uniform, drilled into a self-respecting Englishman—I did not know you."
"But you did, as soon as I said: 'Don't you remember me?'"
"Exactly; because you did say so. But you have not said so to Miss Lutwyche; and don't you see that your very failure to do so would banish the idea of your possible identity from her mind? You come before her with looks, words, manners, your very nationality—all changed! An English landed proprietor! Doubtless she knows nothing of the great diamond find on the High Farm, nor of the fortune you have realised. The idea that you should adopt such a method of gaining access to her, would never strike her, it would not seem characteristic of her preconceived idea of you."