"Are you sure of that?"
"Quite sure that began it. I was just off, and some outlying scrap of my mind was behindhand, and that stone saw it and pounced on it. I remembered more after that. I know I was rather glad to start off to the new gold river, because of Ernestine Clemenceau. I don't think I should have cared to marry Ernestine. Anyhow, I didn't. She seems to me Harrisson's affair now. Don't laugh at me, doctor!"
"I wasn't laughing." And, indeed, this was true. The doctor was very far from laughing.
They had walked some little way inland, keeping along a road sunk in the chalk. This now emerged on an exposed hill-side, swept by the sea wind; which, though abated, still made talk less easy than in the sheltered trench, or behind the long wall where Fenwick lit his cigar. Vereker suggested turning back; and, accordingly, they turned. The doctor found time to make up his mind that no harm could be done now by referring to his interview with Rosalind, the day before.
"Your wife told me yesterday that you had just had a tiresome recurrence
when you came out after us—at the jetty-end, you know."
"Surely! So I had. Did she tell you what it was?" Evidently, in the stress and turmoil of his subsequent experience in the night, it had slipped from him. The doctor said a reminding word or two, and it came back.
"I know, I know. I've got it now. That was last night. But now—that again! Why was it so horrible? That was dear old Kreutzkammer, at 'Frisco. What could there be horrible about him?..." A clear idea shot into the doctor's mind—not a bad thing to work on.
"Fenwick!—don't you see how it is? These things are only horrible to you because you half recollect them. The pain is only the baffled strain on the memory, not the thing you are trying to recover."
"Very likely." He assents, but his mind is dwelling on Kreutzkammer, evidently. For he breaks into a really cheerful laugh, pleasant in the ears of his companion. "Why, that was Diedrich Kreutzkammer!" he exclaims, "up at that Swiss place. And I didn't know him from Adam!"