e, keen cold fell with the
waning afternoon, which sharpened through the sunset till the dusk; but
in the morning the change was from the chill to the glow, and they could
sit in their pavilion, under the willowy droop of the eucalyptus-trees
which have brought the Southern Pacific to the Riviera, with increasing
comfort.

In the restlessness of an elderly man, Gerald sometimes left the young
people to their intolerable delays over their coffee, and walked off
into the little stone and stucco city below, or went and sat with his
cigar on one of the benches under the palm-lined promenade, which the
pale northern consumptives shared with the swarthy peasant girls resting
from their burdens, and the wrinkled grandmothers of their race
passively or actively begging from the strangers.

While she kept her father in sight it seemed that Miss Gerald could
maintain her hold of his identity, and one morning she said, with the
tender fondness for him which touched Lanfear: "When he sits there among
those sick people and poor people, then he knows they are in the world."

She turned with a question graver in her look than usual, and he said:
"Yes, we might help them oftener if we could remember that their misery
was going on all the time, like some great natural process, day or dark,
heat or cold, which seems to stop when we stop thinking of it. Nothing,
for us, at least, exists unless it is recalled to us."

"Yes," she said, in her turn, "I have noticed that. But don't you
sometimes--sometimes"--she knit her forehead, as if to keep her thought
from escaping--"have a feeling as if what you were doing, or saying, or
seeing, had all happened before, just as it is now?"

"Oh yes; that occurs to every one."

"But don't you--don't you have hints of things, of ideas, as if you had
known them, in some previous existence--"

She stopped, and Lanfear recognized, with a kind of impatience, the
experience which young people make much of when they have it, and
sometimes pretend to when they have merely heard of it. But there could
be no pose or pretence in her. He smilingly suggested:

"'For something is, or something seems,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.'

These weird impressions are no more than that, probably."

"Ah, I don't believe it," the girl said. "They are too real for that.
They come too often, and they make me feel as if they would come more
fully, some time. If there was a life before this--do you believe