beautiful! But did he hurt you badly, papa? I saw him, and I wanted to
call to you. But mamma--"

However the change from the oblivion of the past had been operated, it
had been mercifully wrought. As far as Lanfear could note it, in the
rapture of the new revelation to her which it scarcely needed words to
establish, the process was a gradual return from actual facts to the
things of yesterday and then to the things of the day before, and so
back to the tragedy in which she had been stricken. There was no sudden
burst of remembrance, but a slow unveiling of the reality in which her
spirit was mystically fortified against it. At times it seemed to him
that the effect was accomplished in her by supernatural agencies such
as, he remembered once somewhere reading, attend the souls of those
lately dead, and explore their minds till every thought and deed of
their earthly lives, from the last to the first, is revealed to them out
of an inner memory which can never, any jot or tittle, perish. It was as
if this had remained in her intact from the blow that shattered her
outer remembrance. When the final, long-dreaded horror was reached, it
was already a sorrow of the past, suffered and accepted with the
resignation which is the close of grief, as of every other passion.

Love had come to her help in the time of her need, but not love alone
helped her live back to the hour of that supreme experience and beyond
it. In the absorbing interest of her own renascence, the shock, more
than the injury which her father had undergone, was ignored, if not
neglected. Lanfear had not, indeed, neglected it; but he could not help
ignoring it in his happiness, as he remembered afterwards in the
self-reproach which he would not let the girl share with him. Nothing,
he realized, could have availed if everything had been done which he did
not do; but it remained a pang with him that he had so dimly felt his