He was talking in a husky undertone, and brokenly, incoherently.  He made an appeal, which Lanfear seemed not to hear, where he remained immovable with his hand on the girl’s pulse.

“Do you think I am to blame for wishing her never to know it, though without it she must remain deprived of one whole side of life?  Do you think my wishing that can have had anything to do with keeping her—­But this faint may pass and she may wake from it just as she has been.  It is logical that she should remember; but is it certain that she will?”

A murmur, so very faint as to be almost no sound at all, came like a response from the girl’s lips, and she all but imperceptibly stirred.  Her father neither heard nor saw, but Lanfear started forward.  He made a sudden clutch at the girl’s wrist with the hand that had not left it and then remained motionless.  “She will never remember now—­here.”

He fell on his knees beside the bed and began to sob.  “Oh, my dearest!  My poor girl!  My love!” still keeping her wrist in his hand, and laying his head tenderly on her arm.  Suddenly he started, with a shout:  “The pulse!” and fell forward, crushing his ear against her heart, and listened with bursts of:  “It’s beating!  She isn’t dead!  She’s alive!” Then he lifted her in his arms, and it was in his embrace that she opened her eyes, and while she clung to him, entreated: 

“My father!  Where is he?”

A dread fell upon both the men, blighting the joy with which they welcomed her back to life.  She took her father’s head between her hands, and kissed his bruised face.  “I thought you were dead; and I thought that mamma—­” She stopped, and they waited breathless.  “But that was long ago, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” her father eagerly assented.  “Very long ago.”

“I remember,” she sighed.  “I thought that I was killed, too.  Was it all a dream?” Her father and Lanfear looked at each other.  Which should speak?  “This is Doctor Lanfear, isn’t it?” she asked, with a dim smile.  “And I’m not dreaming now, am I?” He had released her from his arms, but she held his hand fast.  “I know it is you, and papa; and yes, I remember everything.  That terrible pain of forgetting is gone!  It’s 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