'The brigadier and the divisional general must hear of it at once!' he cried. 'Why, it is the greatest thing since the war began! And you did nothing, Luscombe?'

'Nothing,' I said; 'this man did it all.' And I enlarged upon the difficulties of the situation, and the way Paul Edgecumbe had overcome them.

'Well, Edgecumbe,' I said, when at length I had an opportunity of speaking to him alone, 'give me an account of yourself. Where have you been? what have you been doing? and how have things been going with you?'

'All right, sir. As to where I have been, and what I have been doing, it's not worth telling about.'

'You don't mind my asking you awkward questions, do you?'

A shadow passed over his face, and a suggestion of the old yearning look came into his eyes.

'No,--no, nothing. Strange, isn't it? Ever since that day when I found myself a good many miles away from Bombay, and realized that I was alive, everything stands out plainly in my memory; but before that,--nothing. I could describe to you in detail almost everything that has taken place since then. But there seems to be a great, black wall which hides everything that took place before. I shudder at it sometimes because it looks so impenetrable. Now and then I have dreams, the same old dreams of black, evil faces, and flashing knives, and cries of agony; but they are only dreams,--I remember nothing.'

'During the time you were in England training,' I said, 'you went to various parts of the country?'

'Yes, I was in Exeter, Swindon, Bramshott, Salisbury Plain.'

'And you recognized none of them, you'd no feeling that you had seen those places before?'

'Faces, now,' I urged; 'do you ever see faces which suggest people you have known in the past?'

'Yes, and no,' he replied. 'I see faces sometimes which, while they don't cause me to remember, give me strange fancies and incomprehensible longings. Sometimes I hear names which have the same effect upon me.'

'And your memory has been good for ordinary things?'

He laughed gaily. 'I think that whatever I went through has increased my powers of memory,--that is, those things that took place since I woke up. If you will ask the sub., or the drill sergeant who gave me my training, they will tell you that there was never any need to tell me anything twice. I forget nothing, I never have to make an effort to remember. When I hear a thing, or see a man's face, I never forget it. I worked hard, too. I have read a good deal. I found that I knew nothing of mathematics, and that my knowledge of German and French was very hazy. It is not so now. Things like _that_ have come to me in a miraculous way.'