She stared blankly at him, without replying, and they silently made their way to Mr. Gerald’s carriage.

“I lost the way, and Miss Gerald found it,” Lanfear explained, as he helped her to the place beside her father.

She said nothing, and almost with sinking into the seat, she sank into that deep slumber which from time to time overtook her.

“I didn’t know we had gone so far—­or rather that we had waited so long before we started down the hills,” Lanfear apologized in an involuntary whisper.

“Oh, it’s all right,” her father said, trying to adjust the girl’s fallen head to his shoulder.  “Get in and help me—­”

Lanfear obeyed, and lent a physician’s skilled aid, which left the cumbrous efforts of her father to the blame he freely bestowed on them.  “You’ll have to come here on the other side,” he said.  “There’s room enough for all three.  Or, hold on!  Let me take your place.”  He took the place in front, and left her to Lanfear’s care, with the trust which was the physician’s right, and with a sense of the girl’s dependence in which she was still a child to him.

They did not speak till well on the way home.  Then the father leaned forward and whispered huskily:  “Do you think she’s as strong as she was?”

Lanfear waited, as if thinking the facts over.  He murmured back:  “No.  She’s better.  She’s not so strong.”

“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.