His words faltered then. The wheels of _his_ memory, starting into
motion, were stilled once more. Again the great darkness dropped over
him; there were only the medals left in their roll of cotton, and the
broken fragments of a story--of some wild, stirring event of the war
just gone--remaining in his mind. Yet to Forest the experiment was an
unqualified success.

"There's no doubt of it!" he exclaimed. He turned to McNamara, the
Governor. "His brain is just as sound as yours or mine. With the right
environment, the right treatment, he'd be on the straight road to
recovery. In a general way of speaking he has recovered now, largely,
from the purely temporary trouble that he had before."

McNamara focused an intent gaze first on Ben, then on the alienist. "It
is, then--as you guessed."

"Absolutely. The night of his arrest marked the end of his trouble; you
might say that his brain simply snapped back into health and began to
function normally again, after a period of temporary mania from
shell-shock. It is true that his memory was left blank, but there
doesn't seem to be any organic reason for it to be blank--other than
lack of incentive to remember. Catch me up, if you don't follow me. In
other words, he has been slowly convalescing since that night: under the
proper stimuli I have no doubt that everything would come back to him."

"And our friend here--Melville--offers to supply those stimuli."

"Exactly. And it's up to you to say whether he gets a chance."

Thoughtfully the executive drummed his desk with his pencil. Presently a