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Then the secretary saw him fumbling at his neck, and at the same moment the black beard came away from the face in his hand.

“Then you are Thorpe!” he gasped, yet somehow without overwhelming surprise.

They stood facing one another in the lonely lane, trees meeting overhead and hiding the stars, and a sound of mournful sighing among the branches.

“I am Thorpe,” was the answer in a voice that almost seemed part of the wind. “And I have come out of our far past to help you, for my debt to you is large, and in this life I had but small opportunity to repay.”

Jones thought quickly of the man’s kindness to him in the office, and a great wave of feeling surged through him as he began to remember dimly the friend by whose side he had already climbed, perhaps through vast ages of his soul’s evolution.

“To help me now?” he whispered.

“You will understand me when you enter into your real memory and recall how great a debt I have to pay for old faithful kindnesses of long ago,” sighed the other in a voice like falling wind.

“Between us, though, there can be no question of debt,” Jones heard himself saying, and remembered the reply that floated to him on the air and the smile that lightened for a moment the stern eyes facing him.

“Not of debt, indeed, but of privilege.”

Jones felt his heart leap out towards this man, this old friend, tried by centuries and still faithful. He made a movement to seize his hand. But the other shifted like a thing of mist, and for a moment the clerk’s head swam and his eyes seemed to fail.

“Then you are dead?” he said under his breath with a slight shiver.

“Five years ago I left the body you knew,” replied Thorpe. “I tried to help you then instinctively, not fully recognising you. But now I can accomplish far more.”

With an awful sense of foreboding and dread in his heart, the secretary was beginning to understand.

“It has to do with–with–?”

“Your past dealings with the Manager,” came the answer, as the wind rose louder among the branches overhead and carried off the remainder of the sentence into the air.

Jones’s memory, which was just beginning to stir among the deepest layers of all, shut down suddenly with a snap, and he followed his companion over fields and down sweet-smelling lanes where the air was fragrant and cool, till they came to a large house, standing gaunt and lonely in the shadows at the edge of a wood. It was wrapped in utter stillness, with windows heavily draped in black, and the clerk, as he looked, felt such an overpowering wave of sadness invade him that his eyes began to burn and smart, and he was conscious of a desire to shed tears.

The key made a harsh noise as it turned in the lock, and when the door swung open into a lofty hall they heard a confused sound of rustling and whispering, as of a great throng of people pressing forward to meet them. The air seemed full of swaying movement, and Jones was certain he saw hands held aloft and dim faces claiming recognition, while in his heart, already oppressed by the approaching burden of vast accumulated memories, he was aware of the uncoiling of something that had been asleep for ages.

As they advanced he heard the doors close with a muffled thunder behind them, and saw that the shadows seemed to retreat and shrink away towards the interior of the house, carrying the hands and faces with them. He heard the wind singing round the walls and over the roof, and its wailing voice mingled with the sound of deep, collective breathing that filled the house like the murmur of a sea; and as they walked up the broad staircase and through the vaulted rooms, where pillars rose like the stems of trees, he knew that the building was crowded, row upon row, with the thronging memories of his own long past.