after an
explosion, Griswold remembered cloudily the supper of tasteless courses
at the Hotel Chouteau, still less distinctly, a drive through the
streets to a great, echoing railway station, a glare of lights too
painful to be borne, and, last of all, an overpowering weariness
shutting down upon him like a sudden closing in of darkness become thick
and stifling.

Afterward there were vague impressions, momentary breaches in the wall
of inclosing darkness when he had realized that he was curiously
helpless, and that he was still on the train going somewhere, though he
could not remember where. In one of these intervals a woman had stood
beside him, and he seemed to remember that she had put her cool hand on
his forehead.

Of the transition from the train to the bed in the upper room at
Mereside, he recalled nothing, though the personalities of two
strangers, the doctor and the nurse, obtruded themselves frequently in
the later phases of the troubled dream, like figures in a shadow
pantomime. Also, that suggestion of the presence of the woman with the
cool palm became self-repeating; and finally, when complete
consciousness returned, the dream impression was still so sharply
defined that he was not surprised to find her standing at his bedside.

He did not recognize her. The memory of his supper companions of the
Hotel Chouteau cafe was deeply buried under the dream debris, and the
present moment was full of mild bewilderment. Yet the friendliness in
her eyes seemed to shine out of some past which ought to be remembered.

Before he could frame any of the queries which came thronging to the
door of the returned consciousness, she smiled and shook her head and
forbade him.

"No, you mustn't talk," she said, with gentle authority. "It's the
doctor's orders. By and by, when you are stronger, you may ask all the
questions you please; but not now."

He wagged his head on the pillow. "Can't I even ask where I am?" he
begged.

"Since you have asked, I'll tell you that much. You are in Wahaska,
Minnesota, in the house of your friends; and you have nothing to do but
to get well as fast and as comfortably as you can."

Her voice was even more remindful than her face of that elusive past
which ought to be remembered, and he closed his eyes to try to recall
it. When he opened them again, she was gone and her place was taken by
one of the figures of the dream; a man with a thick mop of fair hair and
a face of blank good-na