. Gerald made.

"Her intellect--the working powers of her mind, apart from anything like
remembering, are as perfect as if she were in full possession of her
memory. I believe," the father said, with a pride that had its pathos,
"no one can talk with her and not feel that she has a beautiful mind,
that she can think better than most girls of her age. She reads, or she
lets me read to her, and until it has time to fade, she appreciates it
all more fully than I do. At Genoa, where I took her to the palaces for
the pictures, I saw that she had kept her feeling for art. When she
plays--you will hear her play--it is like composing the music for
herself; she does not seem to remember the pieces, she seems to
improvise them. You understand?"

Lanfear said that he understood, for he could not disappoint the
expectation of the father's boastful love: all that was left him of the
ambitions he must once have had for his child.

The poor, little, stout, unpicturesque elderly man got up and began to
walk to and fro in the room which he had turned into with Lanfear, and
to say, more to himself than to Lanfear, as if balancing one thing
against another: "The merciful thing is that she has been saved from the
horror and the sorrow. She knows no more of either than she knows of her
mother's love for her. They were very much alike in looks and mind, and
they were always together more like persons of the same age--sisters, or
girl friends; but she has lost all knowledge of that, as of other
things. And then there is the question whether she won't some time,
sooner or later, come into both the horror and the sorrow." He stopped
and looked at Lanfear. "She has these sudden fits of drowsiness, when
she _must_ sleep; and I never see her wake from them without being
afraid that she has wakened to everything--that she has got back into
her full self, and taken up the terrible burden that my old shoulders
are used to. What do you think?"

Lanfear felt the appeal so keenly that in the effort to answer
faithfully he was aware of being harsher than he meant. "That is a
chance we can't forecast. But it is a chance. The fact that the
drowsiness recurs periodically--"

"It doesn't," the father pleaded. "We don't know when it will come on."

"It scarcely matters. The periodicity wouldn't affect the possible
result which you dread. I don't say that it is probable. But it's one
of the possibilities. It has," Lanfear added, "its logic."

"Ah, its