"
His eyes looked at me again with the painful expression of inquiry,
so wistful, so vacant, so miserably helpless to see. He was evidently
trying hard, and trying in vain, to recover the lost recollection.
"It was a very pleasant dinner," he burst out suddenly, with an air
of saying exactly what he wanted to say. "A very pleasant dinner, Mr.
Blake, wasn't it?" He nodded and smiled, and appeared to think, poor
fellow, that he had succeeded in concealing the total failure of his
memory, by a well-timed exertion of his own presence of mind.
It was so distressing that I at once shifted the talk--deeply as I was
interested in his recovering the lost remembrance--to topics of local
interest.
Here, he got on glibly enough. Trumpery little scandals and quarrels in
the town, some of them as much as a month old, appeared to recur to his
memory readily. He chattered on, with something of the smooth gossiping
fluency of former times. But there were moments, even in the full flow
of his talkativeness, when he suddenly hesitated--looked at me for
a moment with the vacant inquiry once more in his eyes--controlled
himself--and went on again.
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