uences vanished, he had been walking in
the world with no more complexity of mind than a new-born child, nothing
intervening between the sight of the eyes and the original sense.

Now, when the real Charley Steele emerged again, the folds of mind and
soul unrolling to the million-voiced creation and touched by the antenna
of a various civilisation, the phantom Charley was gone once more into
obscurity. The real Charley could remember naught of the other, could
feel naught, save, as in the stirring industrious day, one remembers
that he has dreamed a strange dream the night before, and cannot recall
it, though the overpowering sense of it remains.

He saw the work of his hands, the things he had made with adze and
plane, with chisel and hammer, but nothing seemed familiar save the
smell of the glue pot, which brought back in a cloudy impression curious
unfamiliar feelings. Sights, sounds, motions, passed in a confused way
through his mind as the smell of the glue crept through his nostrils;
and he struggled hard to remember. But no--seven months of his life were
gone for ever. Yet he knew and felt that a vast change had gone over
him, had passed through him. While the soul had lain fallow, while the
body had been growing back to childlike health again, and Nature
had been pouring into his sick senses her healing balm; while the
medicaments of peace and sleep and quiet labour had been having their
way with him, he had been reorganised, renewed, flushed of the turgid
silt of dissipation. For his sins and weaknesses there had been no gall
and vinegar to drink.

As Charley stood looking round the workshop, Jo entered, shaking the
snow from his moccasined feet. "The Cure, M'sieu' Loisel, has come," he
said. Charley turned, and, without a word, followed Jo into the house.
There, standing at the window and looking down at the village
beneath, was the Cure. As Charley entered, M. Loisel came forward with
outstretched hand.

"I am glad to see you well again, Monsieur," he said, and his cool thin
hand held Charley's for a moment, as he looked him benignly in the eye.

With a kind of instinct as to the course he must henceforth pursue,
Charley replied simply, dropping his eye-glass as he met that clear
soluble look of the priest--such a well of simplicity he had never
before seen. Only naked eye could meet that naked eye, imperfect though
his own sight was.

"It is good of you to feel so, and to come and tell me so," he answe