To-day, looking back, it gives me an indescribable ache at my heart to remember the sudden and immense sense of relief his words gave me. I breathed again, as if a window had been opened and a draught of cool fresh air let in.

For if he only meant memory, then the thing wasn't so bad. The maniacal idea that had sent that cold shiver up my spine was capable of an ordinary explanation after all. For what else is memory but the illusion that one is living backwards again in this sense? How many ancient loves, hates, angers, can we not re-experience in any idle hour we choose to give over to reverie? Beyond a doubt Rose had in some way been abusing this mysterious faculty, and Surrey and the pine-woods was the place for him.

"I see," I said at last. "I confess you frightened me for a moment. Anyway that's all right. You only have what we all have more or less. You merely bring greater powers than the rest of us to bear on an ordinary phenomenon. I don't want to talk about your work, but it always did seem to me that you went to rather appalling heights and fearsome depths for the stuff of it. Personally I don't think either heaven or hell is the safest place to go to for 'copy.' Too terrifying altogether."

He seemed to consider this deeply. He was almost quiet again now. Again he cracked invisible nuts, and his heels and toes rose and fell gently and alternately on the carpet.

"That's rather a new idea you've given me, George," he said at last. "I admit I hadn't thought of that. It might explain the beginning anyway—the turn-round. I suppose you mean I've been too close to the flames or the balm, and have got singed or the other thing, whatever you call it. I see. Yes.... It's probably nothing to do with the thyroid after all. I've been reading the wrong books. I never thought of the writings of the Saints. Or the Devils.... By the way, some of the Saints induced the stigmata on themselves by a sort of spiritual process, didn't they?"

I frowned and moved uneasily in my chair. I wasn't anxious to hear Derwent Rose either on ecstasy or blasphemy. But he went on.

"So that's useful as far as it goes. But—you'd hardly call this spiritual, would you?"

I think I mentioned that he wore a soft white collar, pinned and tied with exquisite neatness. A moment later he wore it no longer. Without troubling about pin, studs or buttons, with a swift movement he had ripped the collar, tie and half the shirt-band from his neck, and showed, of an angry and recent purply-red, vivid on his magnificent throat, two curved marks like these brackets—().

Now I am not more squeamish than most men. I am far from having lived the whole of my life in cotton-wool. But it needed no course in medical jurisprudence to tell me what those marks were—the marks of teeth, and of a woman's teeth. I was deeply wounded. Rose's amusements in this sort were no affair of mine, and I strongly resented this humiliation both of himself and of me.

But his hand gripped my arm like a vice. Suddenly I saw a quite new pair in his grey-blue eyes. It was a swift fear lest, instead of helping him, I should turn against him.