"You are mistaken. He could not tell them. They thought he was, what's the word, malingering. They thought he wanted to be sent back and get out of the fighting. Then he complained of the dreadful noise. By degrees they found that he did not even know of the war. They thought of course he was pretending. My father heard of the wound and although he had disowned him he had him brought to our house in Grosvenor Place. We had specialists, those new sorts of doctors who don't depend on medicines. Arthur thought he was still at Harrow eight years or more ago. Then I remembered a boy who shared a study with him there, a boy who had stayed here, a son of Sir Willoughby Hosken who has a place near Penzance. Bingo was somewhere in the Struma valley with his battery and in answer to a letter said that the only act of clumsiness he could call to mind was when he accidentally hit Arthur with an Indian club in the gym at school.
"One of the doctors went over to Harrow and found Arthur had been hit like this and was in the infirmary for three days. Mr. Trent, it was after that accident he altered entirely."
"I've heard of such cases," Trent said quickly. "Pressure of some sort on the brain they call it. There was quite an epidemic of such incidents in America a few years ago. It was supposed to be a cure for bad boys. Then you think—"
"I know," she said emphatically. "He is now exactly as he was when he was a boy, gentle, thoughtful and clean. Our specialists saw the army surgeons and they supposed that in dressing his dreadful wounds they removed the portions of depressed bone and so made this extraordinary cure. They say the war has proved this sort of thing again and again."
The news which spelled salvation to Anthony Trent seemed too tremendous to believe. There was no miracle about it. It was a simple fact demonstrated by surgery and accepted now by the laity. The years in which Arthur Grenvil had sown wild oats and disrupted friendships and relationships was wiped from his consciousness. Trent now understood the half diffident, almost shy manner so inexplicable in a man of the type William Smith had been.
"My father thinks," the girl went on, "that as he will have to find out some of the things he did it will be as well to prepare him for it and shield him against consequences."
"Consequences?" he hazarded.
"I'm afraid," she said gravely, "that it will not be easy. His creditors for example have learned that my father has forgiven him and they are coming down on him. Fortunately my father can afford to pay but there is always the dread of some adventurer turning up and letting us into some dreadful secrets."
"Men like me," he asked.
"You know I didn't mean that," she said. "I think it most wonderful that you are here, because you will be able to tell him something about the good part of his life you know. He is always hoping that his memory will come back but the doctors say it won't." She hesitated a little. "Poor Arthur is very much depressed at times. Could you try and remember as much about him as possible?"