“I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”

“Should you wish me to?” she asked, in evident, however unconscious, recurrence to their talk of the day before.

“Why not?”

She sighed.  “I don’t know.  If it’s like some of those dreams or gleams.  Is remembering pleasant?”

Lanfear thought for a moment.  Then he said, in the honesty he thought best to use with her:  “For the most part I should say it was painful.  Life is tolerable enough while it passes, but when it is past, what remains seems mostly to hurt and humiliate.  I don’t know why we should remember so insistently the foolish things and wrong things we do, and not recall the times when we acted, without an effort, wisely and rightly.”  He thought he had gone too far, and he hedged a little.  “I don’t mean that we can’t recall those times.  We can and do, to console and encourage ourselves; but they don’t recur, without our willing, as the others do.”

She had poured herself a cup of coffee, and she played with the spoon in her saucer while she seemed to listen.  But she could not have been listening, for when she put down her spoon and leaned back in her chair, she said:  “In those dreams the things come from such a very far way back, and they don’t belong to a life that is like this.  They belong to a life like what you hear the life after this is.  We are the same as we are here; but the things are different.  We haven’t the same rules, the same wishes—­I can’t explain.”

“You mean that we are differently conditioned?”

“Yes.  And if you can understand, I feel as if I remembered long back of this, and long forward of this.  But one can’t remember forward!”

“That wouldn’t be remembrance; no, it would be prescience; and your consciousness here, as you were saying yesterday, is through knowing, not remembering.”

She stared at him.  “Was that yesterday?  I thought it was—­to-morrow.”  She rubbed her hand across her forehead as people do when they wish to clear their minds.  Then she sighed deeply.  “It tires me so.  And yet I can’t help trying.”  A light broke over her face at the sound of a step on the gravel walk near by, and she said, laughing, without looking round:  “That is papa!  I knew it was his step.”

V

Such return of memory as she now had was like memory in what we call the lower lives.  It increased, fluctuantly, with an ebb in which it almost disappeared, but with a flow that in its advance carried it beyond its last flood-tide mark.  After the first triumph in which she could address Lanfear by his name, and could greet her father as her father, there were lapses in which she knew them as before, without naming them.  Except mechanically to repeat the names of other people when reminded of them, she did not pass beyond cognition to recognition.  Events still left no trace upon her; or if they did she was not sure whether they