Kitty had said to her mother and to the Young Doctor that he had seemed after he had told his story like one who had awakened; and in a sense it was startlingly true.

It was as though, while he was living under an assumed name, the real James Shiel Gathorne Crozier did not exist, or was in the far background of the doings and sayings of J.G.Kerry.His wife and the past had been shadowy in a way, had been as part of a life lived out, which would return in some distant day, but was not vital to the present.

Much as he had loved his wife, the violent wrench away from her had seemed almost as complete as death itself; but the resumption of his own name and the telling if his story had produced a complete psychological change in him mentally and bodily.

The impersonal feeling which had marked his relations with the two women of this household, and with all women, was suddenly gone.

He longed for the arms of a woman round his neck--it was five years since any woman's arms had been there, since he had kissed any woman's lips.