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“Hullo!” I said, “here’s some people hailing you.”

“Oh, they all do that about here,” he answered, without looking up. “Some beanfeast from Abingdon, I expect.”

The boats draw nearer. When about two hundred yards off an elderly gentleman raised himself up in the prow of the leading one and shouted to us.

McQuae heard his voice, and gave a start that all but pitched him into the water.

“Good God!” he cried, “I’d forgotten all about it.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Why, it’s the Palmers and the Grahams and the Hendersons. I’ve asked them all over to lunch, and there’s not a blessed thing on board but two mutton chops and a pound of potatoes, and I’ve given the boy a holiday.”

Another day I was lunching with him at the Junior Hogarth, when a man named Hallyard, a mutual friend, strolled across to us.

“What are you fellows going to do this afternoon?” he asked, seating himself the opposite side of the table.

“I’m going to stop here and write letters,” I answered.

“Come with me if you want something to do,” said McQuae. “I’m going to drive Leena down to Richmond.” (“Leena” was the young lady he recollected being engaged to. It transpired afterwards that he was engaged to three girls at the time. The other two he had forgotten all about.) “It’s a roomy seat at the back.”

“Oh, all right,” said Hallyard, and they went away together in a hansom.

An hour and a half later Hallyard walked into the smoking-room looking depressed and worn, and flung himself into a chair.

“I thought you were going to Richmond with McQuae,” I said.

“So did I,” he answered.

“Had an accident?” I asked.

“Yes.”

He was decidedly curt in his replies.

“Cart upset?” I continued.

“No, only me.”

His grammar and his nerves seemed thoroughly shaken.

I waited for an explanation, and after a while he gave it.

“We got to Putney,” he said, “with just an occasional run into a tram- car, and were going up the hill, when suddenly he turned a corner. You know his style at a corner–over the curb, across the road, and into the opposite lamp-post. Of course, as a rule one is prepared for it, but I never reckoned on his turning up there, and the first thing I recollect is finding myself sitting in the middle of the street with a dozen fools grinning at me.

“It takes a man a few minutes in such a case to think where he is and what has happened, and when I got up they were some distance away. I ran after them for a quarter of a mile, shouting at the top of my voice, and accompanied by a mob of boys, all yelling like hell on a Bank Holiday. But one might as well have tried to hail the dead, so I took the ‘bus back.

“They might have guessed what had happened,” he added, “by the shifting of the cart, if they’d had any sense. I’m not a light-weight.”

He complained of soreness, and said he would go home. I suggested a cab, but he replied that he would rather walk.

I met McQuae in the evening at the St. James’s Theatre. It was a first night, and he was taking sketches for The Graphic. The moment he saw me he made his way across to me.

“The very man I wanted to see,” he said. “Did I take Hallyard with me in the cart to Richmond this afternoon?”

“You did,” I replied.

“So Leena says,” he answered, greatly bewildered, “but I’ll swear he wasn’t there when we got to the Queen’s Hotel.”

“It’s all right,” I said, “you dropped him at Putney.”

“Dropped him at Putney!” he repeated. “I’ve no recollection of doing so.”

“He has,” I answered. “You ask him about it. He’s full of it.”

Everybody said he never would get married; that it was absurd to suppose he ever would remember the day, the church, and the girl, all in one morning; that if he did get as far as the altar he would forget what he had come for, and would give the bride away to his own best man. Hallyard had an idea that he was already married, but that the fact had slipped his memory. I myself felt sure that if he did marry he would forget all about it the next day.