. I bore her scrutiny
calmly, my heart reproaching me somewhat for speaking as I had done
of my old friend Bold.

Francezka seated herself in her old pensive attitude, her cheek upon
her hand, and there was a long silence, broken only by the dropping of
the embers, and occasionally a faint cry from afar. The hunting party
had returned, and the chase was proceeding merrily in the great
corridors below.

"Babache," she said presently. "One of the chief joys of love is the
living over of past delights. But Gaston and I live together as having
no past. One of the cruelest things about the wound in his head is
that he had long periods of forgetfulness, and certain parts of his
life are absolutely blotted from his mind. And one of those great gaps
is everything that pertained to our courtship and marriage. He
remembers the summer in which we were married, but could not recall
the date until I told him. He also remembers that we were secretly
married and why. By some strange misfortune--perhaps because his mind
was always groping after me in those sad days of wandering, both in
mind and body--all else--those days when we were boy and girl
traveling through Courland; those evenings on the island in the
lake--all, all that pertains to our love is lost to him. He does not
even remember why _O Richard, O mon roi_ was so dear to us. It was not
strange that he should lose his voice for singing, but it is so sad
that he can not remember any of those songs which interpreted our
hearts to each other.

"I tried at first to bring it all back to his mind, telling him the
whole sweet story so deeply written on my heart, but it only
distressed him with the sense of his lapse of memory. He told me it
was his chief agony when he was recovering, in those intolerable days
in the isles of the East, when he knew not how or why he came there,
trying to recall this lost happiness; he never forgot me, but he could
not remember, for a long time, whether we were married or not."

"Those cases are common enough," I said. "I once knew a soldier--a
common man--who was shot as he was in the act of demanding the
countersign. He lingered months between life and death, but lived,
with just such an impaired memory as you describe. At last a surgeon,
experimenting on him, raised a piece of broken bone from his
skull--straightway he recovered memory and understanding, remembered
the countersign--remembered everything, except what had occurred from
the tim