and is eager to return to its point of departure for a fresh start.  I fancy it will be no easy task to discover a new clue, and I shall watch Maitland’s work in this direction with a great deal of curiosity.”  Gwen did not speak, but she listened to our conversation with a nearer approach to a healthy interest than I had known her to display on any other occasion since her father’s death.  I regarded this as a good omen.  Her condition, since that sad occurrence, had worried me a good deal.  She seemed to have lost her hold on life and to exist in a state of wearied listlessness.  Nothing seemed to impress her and she would at times forget, in the midst of a sentence, what she had intended to say when she began it!  Her elasticity was gone and every effort a visible burden to her.  I knew the consciousness of her loss was as a dull, heavy weight bearing her down, and I knew, too, that she could not marshal her will to resist it,—­that, in fact, she really didn’t care, so tired was she of it all.  Experience had taught me how the dull, heavy ache of a great loss will press upon the consciousness with the regular, persistent, relentless throb of a loaded wheel and eat out one’s life with the slow certainty of a cancer.  This I knew to have been Gwen’s state since her father’s death, and all my attempts to bring about a healthful reaction had hitherto been futile.  It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that even the transient interest she had evinced was hailed by me with delight as the beginning of that healthful reaction for which I had so long sought.  When a human bark in the full tide of life is suddenly dashed upon the rocks of despair the wreckage is strewn far and wide, and it is with no little difficulty that enough can be rescued to serve in the rebuilding of even the smallest of craft.  The thought, therefore, that Gwen’s intellectual flotsam was beginning at length to swirl about a definite object in a way to facilitate the rescue of her faculties was to me a decidedly reassuring one, and I noted with pleasure that the state of excited expectancy which she had tried in vain to conceal did not wane, but waxed stronger as the days went by.

The episode of the Parallel readers

CHAPTER I

The events of the present are all strung upon the thread of the past, and in telling over this chronological rosary, it not infrequently happens that strange, unlike beads follow each other between our questioning fingers.

It was nearly a week after his letter before Maitland arrived.  He sent us no further word, but walked in one evening as we were talking about him.  He came upon us so suddenly that we were all taken aback and, for a moment, I felt somewhat alarmed about Gwen.  She had started up quickly when the servant had mentioned Maitland’s name and pressed her hand convulsively upon her heart, while her face and