me,
for all that."

"But then that wasn't a real person, the Reverend--what was
he?--Herrick or Derrick."

Rosalind passed the point by. "Gerry darling! I want you to do as I
tell you. Don't worry your head about it, but keep quiet. If memory
is coming back to you, it will come all the quicker for letting your
mind rest. Let it come gradually."

"I see what you mean. You think it was really a recollection of B.C.?"

"I think so. Why should it not?"

"But it's all gone clean away again! And I can't remember anything
of it at all--and there was heaps!"

"Never mind! If it was real it will come back. Wait and be patient!"

Rosalind's mind laid down this rule for itself--to think and act
exactly as though there had been nothing to fear. Even if all the
past had been easy to face it would have shrunk from suggestions.
So thought she to herself, perhaps with a little excusable
self-deception. Otherwise the natural thing would have been to
repeat to him all the Baron's story.

No! She would not say a word, or give a hint. If it was all to come
back to him, it would come back. If not, she could not bring it back;
and she might, in the attempt to do so, merely plunge his injured
mind into more chaotic confusion. Much safer to do nothing!

But why this sudden stirring of his memory, just now of all times?
Had anything unusual happened lately? Naturally, the inquiry sent
her mind back, to yesterday first, then to the day before. No!--there
was nothing there. Then to generalities. Was it the sea bathing?--the
sea air? And then on a sudden she thought of the thing nearest at
hand, that she should have thought of at first. Yes!--she would ask
Dr. Conrad about _that_: Why hadn't she thought of that before--that
galvanic battery?

Meanwhile, despite her injunctions to her husband to wait and be
patient, his mind kept harking back on this curious recollection.
Luckily, so it seemed to her--at any rate for the present--he did not
seem to recall the Baron's recognition of himself, or to connect it
with this illusion or revival. He appeared to recollect the Baron's
personality, and his liberality with cigars, but little else. If he
was to be reminded of this, it must be after she had talked over it
with Vereker.

They struggled with the weather along the seaward face of the little
old fisher-town. The great wind was blowing the tar-laden atmosphere
of the nets and the all-pervading smell of tar landward; and
substituting fl