‘I can see nothing but darkness,’ he stammered.  ’It is very odd, I have just come back from a long journey.  I don’t even know now where I started from.  I had fever, I know, a fever that raced through my veins like a wild beast.  That was it—­now I remember.  The whole time I had a nightmare, in which I seemed to be crawling along an endless underground passage; and every now and then I had an attack of intolerable pain, and then the passage would be suddenly walled up.  A shower of stones fell from overhead, the side walls closed in, and there I stuck, panting, mad to get on; and then I bored into the obstacle and battered away with feet and fists, and skull, despairing of ever being able to get through the ever increasing mound of rubbish.  At other times, I only had to touch it with my finger and it vanished:  I could then walk freely along the widened gallery, weary only from the pangs of my attack.’

Albine tried to lay a hand upon his lips.

‘No,’ said he, ’it doesn’t tire me to talk.  I can whisper to you here, you see.  I feel as if I were thinking and you could hear me.  The queerest point about that underground journey of mine was that I hadn’t the faintest idea of turning back again; I got obstinate, although I had the thought before me that it would take me thousands of years to clear away a single heap of wreckage.  It seemed a fated task, which I had to fulfil under pain of the greatest misfortunes.  So, with my knees all bruised, and my forehead bumping against the hard rock, I set myself to work with all my might, so that I might get to the end as quickly as possible.  The end?  What was it? . . .  Ah!  I do not know, I do not know.’

He closed his eyes and pondered dreamily.  Then, with a careless pout, he again sank upon Albine’s hand and said laughing:  ’How silly of me!  I am a child.’

But the girl, to ascertain if he were wholly hers, questioned him and led him back to the confused recollections he had tried to summon up.  He could remember nothing, however; he was truly in a happy state of childhood.  He fancied that he had been born the day before.

‘Oh!  I am not strong enough yet,’ he said.  ’My furthest recollection is of a bed which burned me all over, my head rolled about on a pillow like a pan of live coals, and my feet wore away with perpetual rubbing against each other.  I was very bad, I know.  It seemed as if I were having my body changed, as if I were being taken all to pieces, and put together again like some broken machine.’

He laughed at this simile, and continued:  ’I shall be all new again.  My illness has given me a fine cleaning.  But what was it you were asking me?  No, nobody was there.  I was suffering all by myself at the bottom of a black hole.  Nobody, nobody.  And beyond that, nothing —­I can see nothing. . . .  Let me be your child, will you?  You shall teach me to walk.  I can see nothing else but you now.  I care for nothing but you. . . .  I can’t remember, I tell you.  I came, you took me, and that is all.’