bound hand and foot, unable
to cry for help. I think that if I had been left there all night I
should have died again or lost my mind, but in a moment I heard a
noise at the grating and men's voices.

"'I must go in and see her once more,' I heard a strange voice say.
'It seems cruelty to leave her alone in this storm.' And then a
man came in and bent over me. In a moment he called sharply,
'Madoc!--bring me the light.' And then another man came, and I looked
up into two strange, eager, almost terrified faces. I heard incoherent
and excited voices, then the ice was dashed off my chest and I was
caught up in a pair of strong arms and borne swiftly to the house.
They took me to a great blazing fire and wrapped me in blankets and
poured hot drinks down my throat, and soon that terrible chill began
to leave me and the congealed blood in my veins to thaw. And in a few
days I was as well as ever again. But I remembered no one. I had to
become acquainted with them all as with the veriest strangers. I had
the natural intelligence of my years, but nothing more. Between the
hour of my soul's flight from its body and that of its return it had
been robbed of every memory. I remembered neither my mother nor any
incident of my childhood. I could not find my way over the castle,
and the rocks on which I had lived since infancy were strangers to me.
Everything was a blank up to the hour when I opened my eyes and found
myself between the narrow walls of a coffin."

"Upon my word!" exclaimed Dartmouth. "Why, you are a regular heroine
of a sensational novel."

Weir sprang to her feet and struck her hands fiercely together,
her eyes blazing. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she
cried, passionately. "Can you never be serious? Must you joke about
everything? I believe you will find something to laugh at in the
marriage service. That thing I have told you is the most serious and
horrible experience of my life, and yet you treat it as if I were
acting a part in a melodrama in a third-rate theatre! Sometimes I
think I hate you."

Dartmouth caught her in his arms and forced her to sit down again
beside him. "My dear girl," he said, "why is it that a woman can never
understand that when a man feels most he chaffs, especially if he has
cultivated the beastly habit. Your story stirred me powerfully; the
more so because such things do not happen to every-day girls--"

"Harold!"

"Do not wrong me; I am in dead earnest. As a plain matter