own eyes. Strangers,
acquaintances, friends even who could not look at her as we looked, if
she had been shown to them in the first days of her rescue from the
Asylum, might have doubted if she were the Laura Fairlie they had once
seen, and doubted without blame.

The one remaining chance, which I had at first thought might be trusted
to serve us--the chance of appealing to her recollection of persons and
events with which no impostor could be familiar, was proved, by the sad
test of our later experience, to be hopeless. Every little caution
that Marian and I practised towards her--every little remedy we tried,
to strengthen and steady slowly the weakened, shaken faculties, was a
fresh protest in itself against the risk of turning her mind back on
the troubled and the terrible past.

The only events of former days which we ventured on encouraging her to
recall were the little trivial domestic events of that happy time at
Limmeridge, when I first went there and taught her to draw. The day
when I roused those remembrances by showing her the sketch of the
summer-house which she had given me on the morning of our farewell, and
which had never been separated from me since, was the birthday of our
first hope. Tenderly and gradually, the memory of the old walks and
drives dawned upon her, and the poor weary pining eyes looked at Marian
and at me with a new interest, with a faltering thoughtfulness in them,
which from that moment we cherished and kept alive. I bought her a
little box of colours, and a sketch-book like the old sketch-book which
I had seen in her hands on the morning that we first met. Once
again--oh me, once again!--at spare hours saved from my work, in the
dull London light, in the poor London room, I sat by her side to guide
the faltering touch, to help the feeble hand. Day by day I raised and
raised the new interest till its place in the blank of her existence
was at last assured--till she could think of her drawing and talk of
it, and patiently practise it by herself, with some faint reflection of
the innocent pleasure in my encouragement, the growing enjoyment in her
own progress, which belonged to the lost life and the lost happiness of
past days.

We helped her mind slowly by this simple means, we took her out between
us to walk on fine days, in a quiet old City square near at hand, where
there was nothing to confuse or alarm her--we spared a few pounds from
the fund at the banker's to get her w