“A lot of it came back last night and this morning, a lot of it,” he explained.  “It’s queer what miracles small things can work sometimes, isn’t it?  Think what a grain of sand can do to a watch!  This was one of the small things.”  He was still smiling as he touched the scar on his forehead.  “And you, you were the other miracle.  And I’m remembering.  It doesn’t seem like seven or eight years, but only yesterday, that the grain of sand got mixed up somewhere in the machinery in my head.  And I guess there was another reason for my going wrong.  You’ll understand, when I tell you.”

Had he been Conniston it could not have come from him more naturally, more sincerely.  He was living the great lie, and yet to him it was no longer a lie.  He did not hesitate, as shame and conscience might have made him hesitate.  He was fighting that something beautiful might be raised up out of chaos and despair and be made to exist; he was fighting for life in place of death, for happiness in place of grief, for light in place of darkness—­fighting to save where others would destroy.  Therefore the great lie was not a lie but a thing without venom or hurt, an instrument for happiness and for all the things good and beautiful that went to make happiness.  It was his one great weapon.  Without it he would fail, and failure meant desolation.  So he spoke convincingly, for what he said came straight from the heart though it was born in the shadow of that one master-falsehood.  His wonder was that Mary Josephine believed him so utterly that not for an instant was there a questioning doubt in her eyes or on her lips.

He told her how much he “remembered,” which was no more and no less than he had learned from the letters and the clippings.  The story did not appeal to him as particularly unusual or dramatic.  He had passed through too many tragic happenings in the last four years to regard it in that way.  It was simply an unfortunate affair beginning in misfortune, and with its necessary whirlwind of hurt and sorrow.  The one thing of shame he would not keep out of his mind was that he, Derwent Conniston, must have been a poor type of big brother in those days of nine or ten years ago, even though little Mary Josephine had worshiped him.  He was well along in his twenties then.  The Connistons of Darlington were his uncle and aunt, and his uncle was a more or less prominent figure in ship-building interests on the Clyde.  With these people the three—­himself, Mary Josephine, and his brother Egbert—­had lived, “farmed out” to a hard-necked, flinty-hearted pair of relatives because of a brother’s stipulation and a certain English law.  With them they had existed in mutual discontent and dislike.  Derwent, when he became old enough, had stepped over the traces.  All this Keith had gathered from the letters, but there was a great deal that was missing.  Egbert, he gathered, must have been a scapegrace.  He was a cripple of some sort and seven or eight years his