"Yes," the father murmured. "I understand."

What Gerald understood by Lanfear's words might not have been their
meaning, but what Lanfear meant was that there was now an interfusion of
the past and present in her daily experience. She still did not
remember, but she had moments in which she hovered upon such knowledge
of what had happened as she had of actual events. When she was stronger
she seemed farther from this knowledge; when she was weaker she was
nearer it. So it seemed to him in that region where he could be sure of
his own duty when he looked upon it singly as concern for her health. No
inquiry for the psychological possibilities must be suffered to divide
his effort for her physical recovery, though there might come with this
a cessation of the timeless dream-state in which she had her being, and
she might sharply realize the past, as the anaesthete realizes his
return to agony from insensibility. The quality of her mind was as
different from the thing called culture as her manner from convention. A
simplicity beyond the simplicity of childhood was one with a poetic
color in her absolute ideas. But this must cease with her restoration to
the strength in which she could alone come into full and clear
self-consciousness. So far as Lanfear could give reality to his
occupation with her disability, he was ministering to a mind diseased;
not to "rase out its written trouble," but if possible to restore the
obliterated record, and enable her to spell its tragic characters. If he
could, he would have shrunk from this office; but all the more because
he specially had to do with the mystical side of medicine, he always
tried to keep his relation to her free from personal feeling, and his
aim single and matter-of-fact.

It was hard to do this; and there was a glamour in the very