interesting to find yourself drawn back again into that old current, perilous perhaps, but deep, real after all the shams——" 

 He broke off. "Places do the same, I think," he said. "If you have the sort of things in you that stir them they produce in their turn their things . . . and always will for your kind . . . a sort of secret society; I believe," he added, suddenly turning on Harkness and looking him in the face, "that Treliss might give you something of the same adventure that it gave me—if you want it to, that is—if you need it. Do you want adventure, romance, something that will pull you right out of yourself and test you, show you whether you are real or no, give you a crisis that will change you for ever? Do you want it?" 

 Then he added quietly, reflectively. "It changed me more than the war ever did." 

 "Do I want it?" Harkness was breathing deeply, driven by some excitement that he could not stop to analyse. "I should say so. I want nothing so much. It's just what I need, what I've been looking for——" 

 "Then go down there. I believe you're just the kind—but go at the right time. There's a night in August when they have a dance, when they dance all round the town. That's the time for you to go. That will liberate you if you throw yourself into it. It's in August. August the—— I'm not quite sure of the date. I'll write to you if you'll give me your address." 

 Soon afterwards, with a warm clasp of the hand, they parted. 

[1]See Maradick at Forty.

[1]

VI

 Two days later Harkness received a small parcel. Opening it he discovered an old brown-covered book and a letter. 

 The letter was as follows: 

 DEAR Mr. HARKNESS—In all probability in the cold light of reason, and removed from the fumes of the Reform Club, our conversation of yesterday will seem to you nothing but foolishness. Perhaps it was. The merest chance led me to think of something that belongs, for me, to a life quite dead and gone; not perhaps as dead, though, as I had fancied it. In any case, I had not, until yesterday, thought directly of Treliss for years. 

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