logic!"

"Its logic, yes. My business, of course, would be to restore her to
health at any risk. So far as her mind is affected--"

"Her mind is not affected!" the father retorted.

"I beg your pardon--her memory--it might be restored with her physical
health. You understand that? It is a chance; it might or it might not
happen."

The father was apparently facing a risk which he had not squarely faced
before. "I suppose so," he faltered. After a moment he added, with more
courage: "You must do the best you can, at any risk."

Lanfear rose, too. He said, with returning kindness in his tones, if not
his words: "I should like to study the case, Mr. Gerald. It's very
interesting, and--and--if you'll forgive me--very touching."

"Thank you."

"If you decide to stay in San Remo, I will--Do you suppose I could get
a room in this hotel? I don't like mine."

"Why, I haven't any doubt you can. Shall we ask?"

III

It was from the Hotel Sardegna that Lanfear satisfied his conscience by
pushing his search for climate on behalf of his friend's neurasthenic
wife. He decided that Ospedaletti, with a milder air and more sheltered
seat in its valley of palms, would be better for her than San Remo. He
wrote his friend to that effect, and then there was no preoccupation to
hinder him in his devotion to the case of Miss Gerald. He put the case
first in the order of interest rather purposely, and even with a sense
of effort, though he could not deny to himself that a like case related
to a different personality might have been less absorbing. But he tried
to keep his scientific duty to it pure of that certain painful pleasure
which, as a young man not much over thirty, he must feel in the strange
affliction of a young and beautiful girl.

Though there was no present question of medicine, he could be installed
near her, as the friend that her father insisted upon making him,
without contravention of the social formalities. His care of her hardly
differed from that of her father, except that it involved a closer and
more premeditated study. They did not try to keep her from the sort of
association which, in a large hotel of the type of the Sardegna, entails
no sort of obligation to intimacy. They sat together at the long table,
midway of the dining-room, which maintained the tradition of the old
table-d'hote against the small tables ranged along the walls. Gerald had
an amiable old man's liking for talk, and Lanfear saw that he