"Perhaps if you could remember the whole the painfulness might disappear. Does not anything in the image of the railway-station give a clue to its whereabouts?"
"No. It hardly amounts to an image at all—more a fact than an image. But the heat was a fact. And the dresses were all white—thin—tropical...."
"Then the Mrs. Fenwick that comes out of the train isn't dressed as she dresses here?"
"Why, n-n-no!... No, certainly not. But that's natural, you know. Of course, my mind supplies a dress for the heat."
"It doesn't diminish the puzzlement."
"Yes—yes—but it does, though. Because, look here! It's not the only thing. I find myself consciously making Rosey look younger. I can't help my mind—my now mind—working, do what I will! But as to where it was, I fancy I have a clue. I can remember remembering—if you understand me—that I had been in Australia—remembered it at Ontario—talked about it to Tina Clemenceau...."
If Vereker had had any tendency to get on a true scent at this point, the reference to Australia would have thrown him off it. And the thought of the Canadian girl took Fenwick's mind once more
to his American life: "It was my thinking of that girl made all this come back to me, you know. Just after you left us, when we were throwing stones in the sea, last night...."
"Throwing stones in the sea?..."
"Yes—we went down to the waves on the beach, and my throwing a stone in reminded me of it all, after. I was just going to get to sleep, when, all of a sudden, what must I think of but Niagara!—at least, the rapids. I was standing with Mademoiselle Tina—no one else—on a rock overlooking the great torrent, and I threw a stone in, and she said no one would ever see that stone again. I said, 'Like a man when he dies and is forgotten,' or something of that sort. I recollect her now—poor child!—turning her eyes full on me and saying, 'But I should not forget you, Mr. Harrisson.' You see how it was? Only it seems a sort of disloyalty to the poor girl to tell it. It was all plain, and she meant it to be. I can't remember now whether I said, 'I can't marry you, Tina, because I don't know that my wife is dead,' or whether I only thought it. But I know that I then knew I was, or had been, married and divorced or deserted. And it was that unhappy stone that brought it all back to me."