nd laying
his head tenderly on her arm. Suddenly he started, with a shout: "The
pulse!" and fell forward, crushing his ear against her heart, and
listened with bursts of: "It's beating! She isn't dead! She's alive!"
Then he lifted her in his arms, and it was in his embrace that she
opened her eyes, and while she clung to him, entreated:

"My father! Where is he?"

A dread fell upon both the men, blighting the joy with which they
welcomed her back to life. She took her father's head between her hands,
and kissed his bruised face. "I thought you were dead; and I thought
that mamma--" She stopped, and they waited breathless. "But that was
long ago, wasn't it?"

"Yes," her father eagerly assented. "Very long ago."

"I remember," she sighed. "I thought that I was killed, too. Was it
_all_ a dream?" Her father and Lanfear looked at each other. Which
should speak? "This is Doctor Lanfear, isn't it?" she asked, with a dim
smile. "And I'm not dreaming now, am I?" He had released her from his
arms, but she held his hand fast. "I know it is you, and papa; and yes,
I remember everything. That terrible pain of forgetting is gone! It's
beautiful! But did he hurt you badly, papa? I saw him, and I wanted to
call to you. But mamma--"

However the change from the oblivion of the past had been operated, it
had been mercifully wrought. As far as Lanfear could note it, in the
rapture of the new revelation to her which it scarcely needed words to
establish, the process was a gradual return from actual facts to the
things of yesterday and then to the things of the day before, and so
back to the tragedy in which she had been stricken. There was no sudden
burst of remembrance, but a slow unveiling of the reality in which her
spirit was mystically fortified against it. At times it seemed to him
that the effect was accomplished in her by supernatural 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 th