f External
Nature to the Physical Condition of Man (Sect. iii. p. 18).

CHAPTER LVI.

Lilian recovered, but the strange thing was this: all memory of the
weeks that had elapsed since her return from visiting her aunt was
completely obliterated; she seemed in profound ignorance of the charge
on which I had been confined,--perfectly ignorant even of the existence
of Margrave. She had, indeed, a very vague reminiscence of her
conversation with me in the garden,--the first conversation which had
ever been embittered by a disagreement,--but that disagreement itself
she did not recollect. Her belief was that she had been ill and
light-headed since that evening. From that evening to the hour of her
waking, conscious and revived, all was a blank. Her love for me was
restored, as if its thread had never been broken. Some such instances of
oblivion after bodily illness or mental shock are familiar enough to the
practice of all medical men;(1) and I was therefore enabled to appease
the anxiety and wonder of Mrs. Ashleigh, by quoting various examples of
loss, or suspension, of memory. We agreed that it would be necessary
to break to Lilian, though very cautiously, the story of Sir Philip
Derval's murder, and the charge to which I had been subjected. She could
not fail to hear of those events from others. How shall I express her
womanly terror, her loving, sympathizing pity, on hearing the tale,
which I softened as well as I could?

"And to think that I knew nothing of this!" she cried, clasping my hand;
"to think that you were in peril, and that I was not by your side!"

Her mother spoke of Margrave, as a visitor,--an agreeable, lively
stranger; Lilian could not even recollect his name, but she seemed
shocked to think that any visitor had been admitted while I was in
circumstances so awful! Need I say that our engagement was renewed?
Renewed! To her knowledge and to her heart it had never been interrupted
for a moment. But oh! the malignity of the wrong world! Oh, that strange
lust of mangling reputations, which seizes on hearts the least wantonly
cruel! Let two idle tongues utter a tale against some third person,
who never offended the babblers, and how the tale spreads, like fire,
lighted none know how, in the herbage of an American prairie! Who shall
put it out?

What right have we to pry into the secrets of other men's hearths? True
or false, the tale that is gabbled to us, what concern of ours can it
be? I speak no