were things she had dreamed or experienced. But
her memory grew stronger in the region where the bird
knows its way home to the nest, or the bee to the
hive. She had an unerring instinct for places
where she had once been, and she found her way to
them again without the help from the association which
sometimes failed Lanfear. Their walks were always
taken with her father’s company in his carriage,
but they sometimes left him at a point of the Berigo
Road, and after a long detour among the vineyards
and olive orchards of the heights above, rejoined him
at another point they had agreed upon with him.
One afternoon, when Lanfear had climbed the rough
pave of the footways with her to one of the summits,
they stopped to rest on the wall of a terrace, where
they sat watching the changing light on the sea, through
a break in the trees. The shadows surprised them
on their height, and they had to make their way among
them over the farm paths and by the dry beds of the
torrents to the carriage road far below. They
had been that walk only once before, and Lanfear failed
of his reckoning, except the downward course which
must bring them out on the high-road at last.
But Miss Gerald’s instinct saved them where
his reason failed. She did not remember, but
she knew the way, and she led him on as if she were
inventing it, or as if it had been indelibly traced
upon her mind and she had only to follow the mystical
lines within to be sure of her course. She confessed
to being very tired, and each step must have increased
her fatigue, but each step seemed to clear her perception
of the next to be taken.
Suddenly, when Lanfear was blaming himself for bringing
all this upon her, and then for trusting to her guidance,
he recognized a certain peasant’s house, and
in a few moments they had descended the olive-orchard
terraces to a broken cistern in the clear twilight
beyond the dusk. She suddenly halted him.
“There, there! It happened then—now—this
instant!”
“What?”
“That feeling of being here before! There
is the curb of the old cistern; and the place where
the terrace wall is broken; and the path up to the
vineyard—Don’t you feel it, too?”
she demanded, with a joyousness which had no pleasure
for him.
“Yes, certainly. We were here last week.
We went up the path to the farm-house to get some
water.”
“Yes, now I am remembering—remembering!”
She stood with eagerly parted lips, and glancing quickly
round with glowing eyes, whose light faded in the
same instant. “No!” she said, mournfully,
“it’s gone.”
A sound of wheels in the road ceased, and her father’s
voice called: “Don’t you want to
take my place, and let me walk awhile, Nannie?”
“No. You come to me, papa. Something
very strange has happened; something you will be surprised
at. Hurry!” She seemed to be joking, as
he was, while she beckoned him impatiently towards
her.
He had left his carriage, and he came up with a heavy
man’s quickened pace. “Well, what
is the wonderful thing?” he panted out.