Ben’s starting eyes fastened on them.  No doubt he recognized them.  A look of veritable anguish swept his brown face, and all at once small drops of moisture appeared on his brow and through the short hairs at his temples.  The dark scar at his temple was suddenly brightly red from the pounding blood beneath.

“The Victoria Cross, of course,” he said slowly, brokenly.  “I won it, didn’t I—­the day—­that day at Ypres—­the day my men were trapped—­”

His words faltered then.  The wheels of his memory, starting into motion, were stilled once more.  Again the great darkness dropped over him; there were only the medals left in their roll of cotton, and the broken fragments of a story—­of some wild, stirring event of the war just gone—­remaining in his mind.  Yet to Forest the experiment was an unqualified success.

“There’s no doubt of it!” he exclaimed.  He turned to McNamara, the Governor.  “His brain is just as sound as yours or mine.  With the right environment, the right treatment, he’d be on the straight road to recovery.  In a general way of speaking he has recovered now, largely, from the purely temporary trouble that he had before.”

McNamara focused an intent gaze first on Ben, then on the alienist.  “It is, then—­as you guessed.”

“Absolutely.  The night of his arrest marked the end of his trouble; you might say that his brain simply snapped back into health and began to function normally again, after a period of temporary mania from shell-shock.  It is true that his memory was left blank, but there doesn’t seem to be any organic reason for it to be blank—­other than lack of incentive to remember.  Catch me up, if you don’t follow me.  In other words, he has been slowly convalescing since that night:  under the proper stimuli I have no doubt that everything would come back to him.”

“And our friend here—­Melville—­offers to supply those stimuli.”

“Exactly.  And it’s up to you to say whether he gets a chance.”

Thoughtfully the executive drummed his desk with his pencil.  Presently a smile, markedly boyish and pleasant, broke over his face.  More than once, in the line of duty imposed by his high office, he had been obliged to make decisions contrary to every dictate of mercy.  He was all the more pleased at this opportunity to do, with a clear conscience, the thing that his kindness prompted.  He turned slowly in his chair.

“Darby, I suppose you followed what the doctor said?” he asked easily.

“Fairly well, I think.”

“I’ll review it, if I may.  It seems, Ben, that you have been the victim of a strange set of unfortunate circumstances.  Due to the efforts of an old family friend—­a most devoted and earnest friend if I may say so—­we’ve looked up your record, and now we know more about you than you know about yourself.  You served in France with Canadian troops and there, you will be proud to know, you won among other honors the highest honor that the Government of England can award a hero.  There you were shell-shocked, in the last months of the war.