"It seems to me as if I had been here before. Have I?"

"No. This is the first time."

She said no more, but seemed disappointed in his answer, and he
suggested: "Perhaps it is the cold that reminds you of our winters at
home, and makes you feel that the scene is familiar."

"Yes, that is it!" she returned, joyously. "Was there snow, there, like
that on the mountains yonder?"

"A good deal more, I fancy. That will be gone in a few days, and at
home, you know, our snow lasts for weeks."

"Then that is what I was thinking of," she said, and she ran strongly
and lightly forward. "Come!"

When the harsh weather passed and the mild climate returned there was no
lapse of her strength. A bloom, palely pink as the flowers that began to
flush the almond-trees, came upon her delicate beauty, a light like that
of the lengthening days dawned in her eyes. She had an instinct for the
earliest violets among the grass under the olives; she was first to hear
the blackcaps singing in the garden-tops; and nothing that was novel in
her experience seemed alien to it. This was the sum of what Lanfear got
by the questioning which he needlessly tried to keep indirect. She knew
that she was his patient, and in what manner, and she had let him divine
that her loss of memory was suffering as well as deprivation. She had
not merely the fatigue which we all undergo from the effort to recall
things, and which sometimes reaches exhaustion; but there was apparently
in the void of her oblivion a perpetual rumor of events, names,