Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/430

 vously; "I think I had better try to get it away. If she doesn't know me—her husband—she'll be fancying baby is a rat, or a blackbeetle, or something! Kitchee, kitchee. Hang it—you fellows don't seem to know me! What's come to me? I do believe there's a something about me that—which—that isn't—"

He rushed to the cheval glass, gazed at himself a moment, then sank on the floor with his hands clutching at his hair.

"I've muddled it somehow!" he whispered to himself.

"It's all right." said Pinniger, soothingly, advancing with a Japanese fan he had hastily snatched up, and waving it gently before the stranger, to amuse and quiet him. "There's a nice cab coming to fetch you, and a man with nice, bright buttons all down his coat. So nice! Be here in a minute, if you sit nice and still."

"Pinniger, my dear fellow, don't!" said the stranger. "Can't you see I'm—no, I suppose you can't; but I am—Moozeby. I've been precipitating myself, and somehow muddled it. You see, I was anxious to get home here quickly from the City so as to receive the people; but I missed my train, so I found a nice quiet spot in the Temple Gardens and elementalised myself, so that I might re-precipitate myself here at once; but somehow (I fancy I was thinking of a business acquaintance whom I had just left at the bottom of Ludgate-hill) I muddled it, and mixed myself up somehow, and I seem to have come out something like him here and there. You see—yes—he has a little bit of hair right in the middle of his forehead, and here it is; and this is his heavy moustache; and his legs are much longer than mine, and I seem to have one of his and one of my own, and two different kinds of boots, too. Dear, dear! But look here, this mole at the back of my neck, that is mine. Look, my love, see? Mole! It's all right. I must really be chiefly myself, speaking in a general way and on broad lines, while I have that mole. Where that mole is I am; because they always used to distinguish me, as a baby, from other babies of the same size, by means of that mole. Yes, here it is; the large one, with the little tiny one by the side of it, for luck."

Mrs. Moozeby at length persuaded herself to approach him, and examine the mole; then her harrowed feelings found relief in sobs.

"I wish you had never seen those hateful Mahatma books, 'Hysteric Buddhism,' and the rest of them!" she said. "As if you had not quite enough irritating habits before, Robert! And now