“Ah! the dinner, the dinner at Lady Verinder’s!” he exclaimed, more eagerly than ever.  “I have got something to say to you about that.”

His eyes looked at me again with the painful expression of inquiry, so wistful, so vacant, so miserably helpless to see.  He was evidently trying hard, and trying in vain, to recover the lost recollection.  “It was a very pleasant dinner,” he burst out suddenly, with an air of saying exactly what he wanted to say.  “A very pleasant dinner, Mr. Blake, wasn’t it?” He nodded and smiled, and appeared to think, poor fellow, that he had succeeded in concealing the total failure of his memory, by a well-timed exertion of his own presence of mind.

It was so distressing that I at once shifted the talk—­deeply as I was interested in his recovering the lost remembrance—­to topics of local interest.

Here, he got on glibly enough.  Trumpery little scandals and quarrels in the town, some of them as much as a month old, appeared to recur to his memory readily.  He chattered on, with something of the smooth gossiping fluency of former times.  But there were moments, even in the full flow of his talkativeness, when he suddenly hesitated—­looked at me for a moment with the vacant inquiry once more in his eyes—­controlled himself—­and went on again.  I submitted patiently to my martyrdom (it is surely nothing less than martyrdom to a man of cosmopolitan sympathies, to absorb in silent resignation the news of a country town?) until the clock on the chimney-piece told me that my visit had been prolonged beyond half an hour.  Having now some right to consider the sacrifice as complete, I rose to take leave.  As we shook hands, Mr. Candy reverted to the birthday festival of his own accord.

“I am so glad we have met again,” he said.  “I had it on my mind—­I really had it on my mind, Mr. Blake, to speak to you.  About the dinner at Lady Verinder’s, you know?  A pleasant dinner—­really a pleasant dinner now, wasn’t it?”

On repeating the phrase, he seemed to feel hardly as certain of having prevented me from suspecting his lapse of memory, as he had felt on the first occasion.  The wistful look clouded his face again:  and, after apparently designing to accompany me to the street door, he suddenly changed his mind, rang the bell for the servant, and remained in the drawing-room.

I went slowly down the doctor’s stairs, feeling the disheartening conviction that he really had something to say which it was vitally important to me to hear, and that he was morally incapable of saying it.  The effort of remembering that he wanted to speak to me was, but too evidently, the only effort that his enfeebled memory was now able to achieve.

Just as I reached the bottom of the stairs, and had turned a corner on my way to the outer hall, a door opened softly somewhere on the ground floor of the house, and a gentle voice said behind me:—­

“I am afraid, sir, you find Mr. Candy sadly changed?”