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 duty to the gentle old man, even while he did it.  Gerald lived to witness his daughter’s perfect recovery of the self so long lost to her; he lived, with a joy more explicit than their own, to see her the wife of the man to whom she was dearer than love alone could have made her.  He lived beyond that time, rejoicing, if it may be so said, in the fond memories of her mother which he had been so long forbidden by her affliction to recall.  Then, after the spring of the Riviera had whitened into summer, and San Remo hid, as well as it could, its sunny glare behind its pines and palms, Gerald suffered one long afternoon through the heat till the breathless evening, and went early to bed.  He had been full of plans for spending the rest of the summer at the little place in New England where his daughter knew that her mother lay.  In the morning he did not wake.

“He gave his life that I might have mine!” she lamented in the first wild grief.

“No, don’t say that, Nannie,” her husband protested, calling her by the pet name which her father always used.  “He is dead; but if we owe each other to his loss, it is because he was given, not because he gave himself.”

“Oh, I know, I know!” she wailed.  “But he would gladly have given himself for me.”

That, perhaps, Lanfear could not have denied, and he had no wish to do so.  He had a prescience of happiness for her which the future did not belie; and he divined that a woman must not be forbidden the extremes within which she means to rest her soul.

II

THE EIDOLONS OF BROOKS ALFORD