“Do you mind if we drive about a bit and talk things over before I see Elinor—­Ruth, as you call her?  I’m funking that a little though I’ve been trying ever since your brother told me the story to get used to the idea of her being, well not quite right, you know.  But I can’t stick it somehow.”

“She is all right, perfectly normal every way except that she had forgotten things.”  Larry’s voice was faintly indignant.  He resented anybody’s implying that Ruth was queer, unbalanced in any way.  She wasn’t.  She was absolutely sane, as sane as Captain Annersley himself, considerably more sane than Larry Holiday could take oath he was at this moment.

“Good heavens!  Isn’t that enough?” groaned Annersley almost equally indignant.  “You forget or rather you don’t know all she has forgotten.  I know.  I was brought up with her.  Her father was my uncle and guardian.  We played together, had the same tutor, rode the same ponies, got into the same jolly old scrapes.  Why, Elinor’s like my own sister, man.  I can’t swallow her forgetting me and her brother Rod and all the rest as easily as you seem to do.  It—­well, it’s the limit as you say in the states.”  The captain wiped his forehead on which great drops of perspiration stood in spite of the January chill in the air.  There was agitation, suppressed vehemence in his tone.

“I suppose it is natural that you should feel that way.”  Larry spoke thoughtfully as he turned the car away from the Hill in response to his guest’s request that he be permitted to postpone meeting Elinor Ruth Farringdon a little while.  “The remembering part hasn’t bothered me so much.  Maybe I wasn’t very keen on having her remember.  Maybe I was afraid she would remember too much,” he added coloring a little.

The frown on his companion’s stern young face melted at that.  The frank, boyish smile appeared again.  He liked Larry Holiday none the less for his lack of pretense.  He understood all that.  The younger Holiday had taken pains to make things perfectly clear to him.  He knew precisely what the young doctor was afraid of and why in case Elinor Farringdon’s memory returned.

“My uncle thinks and I think too that her memory will come back now that it has the external stimulus to waken it,” Larry continued.  “I shouldn’t be surprised if seeing you would give the necessary impetus.  In fact I am counting on that very thing happening, hoping for it with all my might.  That was one of the reasons I was glad to have you come.  Please believe that I should have been glad even if your coming had made her remember she was your wife.  Of course her recovery is the main thing.  The rest is—­a side issue.”