did. When you came to, did you remember your actions during the month of

aberration?"

"When I came to," said Simon, speaking almost with his teeth set, "I was like a person stunned. Then I remembered, bit by bit, what I had been doing, but it was like vaguely remembering what another man had been doing."

"Right," said Oppenshaw, "that tallies with your case. Go on."

"I had been doing foolish things. I had been living, so to say, on the surface of life, without a thought of anything but pleasure, without the slightest recollection of myself as I am. I had been doing things that I might have done at twenty--extravagant follies; yet I believe not any really vicious acts. I had been drinking too much champagne, for one thing, and there were several ladies.... Good Lord! Oppenshaw, I'd blush to confess it to anyone else, but I'd been going on like a boy, picking flowers at Fontainebleau--writing verses to one of these hussies. I could remember that. Me!--verses about blue skies and streams and things! Me! It's horrible!"

"Used you to write verses when you were young?"

"Yes," said Simon, "I believe I used to make that sort of fool of myself."

"You were full of the joy of living?"

"I suppose so."

"You see, everything tallies. Yes, without any manner of doubt it's a case of Lethmann's disease rounded and complete. Now, tell me, when you came to, you could remember all your actions in Paris; how far back did that memory go?"

"I could remember dimly right back to when I was leaving the office in Old Serjeants' Inn with the bundle of bank-notes to go to the bank. Then all of a sudden it would seem I forgot all about my past and became, as you insist, myself at twenty. I went to the Charing Cross Hotel, where I had already, it would seem, hired rooms for myself, and where I had directed new clothes to be sent, and then I went to Paris."

"This is most important," said Oppenshaw. "You had already hired rooms for yourself and ordered clothes. Those acts must have been committed before the great change came on you, and of course without your knowledge."

"They must. Also the act of drawing the ten thousand from the bank."

"The concealed other self must have been working like a mole in the dark for some days at least," said Oppenshaw, "utterly without your knowledge."

"Utterly."

"Then having prepared in a vague sort of way a means for enjoying itself, it burst out; it was like a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis--excuse the simile."

"Something like that."

"So far so good. Well, now, when you came to your old self in Paris, what did you do?"

"I came back to London, of course."

"But surely your sudden disappearance must have caused alarm? Why, it would have been in the papers."

"Not a bit," said Simon grimly. "My other self, as you call it, had prepared for that. It seems the night before the thing happened I told Mudd--you know Mudd, the butler--that I might be called away suddenly and be absent a considerable time, that I would buy clothes and nightshirts and things, if that was so, at the place I was going to, and that he was to tell the office if I went away, and to tell Brownlow to carry on. Infernal, isn't it?"

"Infernally ingenious," said Oppenshaw; "but if you had ever studied the subject of duplex personality you would not be surprised. I have seen a young religious girl make most complex preparations for a journey as a missionary to China, utterly without her own knowledge. We caught her at the station, fortunately, just in time--but how did you find out that you gave Mudd those instructions?"

"The whole way back from Paris," said Simon, "I was preparing to meet all sorts of enquiry and bother as to my absence. Then, when I reached home, Mudd did not seem to think it out of the way; he told me he had followed my directions and notified the office when I did not return, and told them that I might be some time away. Then I got out of him what I had said about the clothes and so on."

"Tell me," said Oppenshaw suddenly, "why did you come to me to-day to tell me all this?"

"Because," said Simon, "on opening my safe this morning I found in a wallet on the top of the deed-box another bundle of notes for exactly the same amount."