w would fade when she
passed them.

The next morning, when she came down unwontedly late to breakfast in
their pavilion, she called gayly:

"Dr. Lanfear! It _is_ Dr. Lanfear?"

"I should be sorry if it were not, since you seem to expect it, Miss
Gerald."

"Oh, I just wanted to be sure. Hasn't my father been here, yet?" It was
the first time she had shown herself aware of her father except in his
presence, as it was the first time she had named Lanfear to his face.

He suppressed a remote stir of anxiety, and answered: "He went to get
his newspapers; he wished you not to wait. I hope you slept well?"

"Splendidly. But I was very tired last night; I don't know why,
exactly."

"We had rather a long walk."

"Did we have a walk yesterday?"

"Yes."

"Then it was _so_! I thought I had dreamed it. I was beginning to
remember something, and my father asked me what it was, and then I
couldn't remember. Do you believe I shall keep on remembering?"

"I don't see why you shouldn't."

"Should you wish me to?" she asked, in evident, however unconscious,
recurrence to their talk of the day before.

"Why not?"

She sighed. "I don't know. If it's like some of those dreams or gleams.
Is remembering pleasant?"

Lanfear thought for a moment. Then he said, in the honesty he thought
best to use with her: "For the most part I should say it was painful.
Life is tolerable enough while it passes, but when it is past, what
remains seems mostly to hurt and humiliate. I don't know why we should
remember so insistently the foolish things and wrong things we do, and
not recall the times when we acted, without an effort, wisely and
rightly." He thought he had gone too far, and he hedged a little. "I
don't mean that we _can't_ recall those times. We can and do, to console
and encourage ourselves; but they don't recur, without our willing, as
the others do."

She had poured herself a cup of coffee, and she played with the spoon in
her saucer while she seemed to listen. But she could not have been
listening, for when she put down her spoon and leaned back in her chair,
she said: "In those dreams the things come from such a very far way
back, and they don't belong to a life that is like this. They belong to
a life like what you hear the life after this is. We are the same as we
are here; but the things are different. We haven't the same rules, the
same wishes--I can't explain."

"You mean that we are differently conditioned?"

"Ye