e time of her need, but not love alone
helped her live back to the hour of that supreme experience and beyond
it. In the absorbing interest of her own renascence, the shock, more
than the injury which her father had undergone, was ignored, if not
neglected. Lanfear had not, indeed, neglected it; but he could not help
ignoring it in his happiness, as he remembered afterwards in the
self-reproach which he would not let the girl share with him. Nothing,
he realized, could have availed if everything had been done which he did
not do; but it remained a pang with him that he had so dimly felt his
duty to the gentle old man, even while he did it. Gerald lived to
witness his daughter's perfect recovery of the self so long lost to her;
he lived, with a joy more explicit than their own, to see her the wife
of the man to whom she was dearer than love alone could have made her.
He lived beyond that time, rejoicing, if it may be so said, in the fond
memories of her mother which he had been so long forbidden by her
affliction to recall. Then, after the spring of the Riviera had whitened
into summer, and San Remo hid, as well as it could, its sunny glare
behind its pines and palms, Gerald suffered one long afternoon through
the heat till the breathless evening, and went early to bed. He had been
full of plans for spending the rest of the summer at the little place in
New England where his daughter knew that her mother lay. In the morning
he did not wake.

"He gave his life that I might have mine!" she lamented in the first
wild grief.

"No, don't say that, Nannie," her husband protested, calling her by the
pet name which her father always used. "He is dead; but if we owe each
other to his loss, it is because he was given, not because he gave
himself."

"Oh, I know, I know!" she wailed. "But he would gladly have given
himself for me."

That, perhaps, Lanfear could not have denied, and he had no wish to do
so. He had a prescience of happiness for her which the future did not
belie; and he divined that a woman must not be forbidden the extremes
within which she means to rest her soul.

II

THE EIDOLONS OF BROOKS ALFORD

I should like to give the story of Alford's experiences just as Wanhope
told it, sitting with us before the glowing hearth in the Turkish room,
one night after the other diners at our club had gone away to digest
their dinners at the theatre, or in their bachelor apartments up-town,
or on the late trains