Five months ago my wife was killed before my daughter's eyes--"

He stopped; Lanfear breathed a gentle "Oh!" and Gerald blurted out:

"Accident--grade crossing--Don't!" he winced at the kindness in
Lanfear's eyes, and panted on. "That's over! What happened to _her_--to
my daughter--was that she fainted from the shock. When she woke--it was
more like a sleep than a swoon--she didn't remember what had happened."
Lanfear nodded, with a gravely interested face. "She didn't remember
anything that had ever happened before. She knew me, because I was there
with her; but she didn't know that she ever had a mother, because she
was not there with her. You see?"

"I can imagine," Lanfear assented.

"The whole of her life before the--accident was wiped out as to the
facts, as completely as if it had never been; and now every day, every
hour, every minute, as it passes, goes with that past. But her
faculties--"

"Yes?" Lanfear prompted in the pause which Mr. Gerald made.

"Her intellect--the working powers of her mind, apart from anything like
remembering, are as perfect as if she were in full possession of her
memory. I believe," the father said, with a pride that had its pathos,
"no one can talk with her and not feel that she has a beautiful mind,
that she can think better than most girls of her age. She reads, or she
lets me read to her, and until it has time to fade, she appreciates it
all more fully than I do. At Genoa, where I took her to the palaces for
the pictures, I saw that she had kept her feeling for art. When she