tell you that I know that my first husband is not dead.... Yes, dear;
don't try to speak. You'll see when I tell you.... Algernon Palliser
is not dead, though we thought he must be. He went away from Lahore
after the proceedings, and he did go to Australia, no doubt, as we
heard at the time; but after that he went to America, and was there
till two years ago ... and then he came to England." The old man tried
to speak, but this time his voice failed, and Rosalind thought it best
to go straight on. "He came to England, dear, and met with a bad
accident, and lost his memory...."

"_What!_" The word came so suddenly and clearly that it gave her new
courage to go on. She _must_ tell it all now, and she felt sure he
was hearing and understanding all she said.

"Yes, dear; it's all true. Let me tell it all. He lost his memory
completely, so that he did not know his own name...."

"My God!"

"Did not know his own name, dear--did not know his own name--did
not know the face of the wife he lost twenty years ago--all, all a
blank!... Yes, yes; it was he himself, and I took him and kept him,
and I have him now ... and oh, my dear, my dear, he does not know
it--knows _nothing_! He does not know who I am, nor who he was, nor
that Sally is the baby; but he loves her dearly, as he never could
have loved her if ... if...."

She could say no more. The torrent of tears that was the first actual
relief to the weight upon her heart of two years of secrecy grew and
grew till speech was overwhelmed. But she knew that her story, however
scantily told, had reached her listener's mind, though she could not
have said precisely at what moment he came to know it. The tone of
his exclamation, "My God!" perhaps had made her take his knowledge for
granted. Of one thing, however, she felt certain--that details were
needless, would add nothing to the main fact, which she was quite
convinced her old friend had grasped with a mind still capable of
holding it, although it might be in death. Even so one tells a child
the outcome only of what one tells in full to older ears. Then quick
on the heels of the relief of sharing her burden with another followed
the thought of how soon the sympathy she had gained must be lost,
buried--so runs the code of current speech--in her old friend's grave.
All her heart poured out in tears on the hand that could still close
fitfully upon her own as she knelt by the bed on which he would so
soon lie dying.

Presently