young man's fears departed, and content returned to him. It was so natural to sit with her thus! Yet his content had an underlying pathos in it, since their situation—his and hers—though immediately happy was so very strange.

At last he asked her:—"Did you know me from the first?"

And she replied with an air of gracious diffidence infinitely engaging:—"I can hardly tell you. For so long confusion has reigned in my poor mind that all had become to me vague and undetermined. I was so very tired that even that which I most craved, I, in a measure, shrank from. I seemed to wander everlastingly in blank and desolate places. I seemed to move in an interspace between the confines of two worlds, to neither of which could I gain admittance. I could not go forward, neither could I go back. Everything baffled me; everything was so difficult to understand."

"But now you have left those blank and desolate places? Now you understand?" Laurence asked, keenly interested in, yet a little dreading her answer.

"I think so. Still joy has been too long a stranger, for me wholly to trust it even yet. And I fear there are still lapses and deficiencies in my intelligence. I could fancy—but doubtless these are but silly fancies, born of illness—that I am not as I used to be, and that I feel the miss of much I once had and now have not."

She looked up at him, her eyes troubled once more to their very depths.

"In what am I lacking, Laurence?" she inquired piteously. "I feel that I am lacking, and I tremble lest I should disappoint you. Indeed, I will strive to remedy my fault, whatever it may be, if you will but be patient with me and tell me plainly of it, and give me opportunity to effect a cure."

But he answered her soothingly, stung by the humility and innocence of her attitude.

"You are wanting in nothing that time will not set right. But we must make haste slowly, sweetheart. So put all these sick fancies out of your head. We will worry neither about past or future; but, like true economists, will enjoy the present. Now let us talk of the time before I left you to rejoin my ship. Of that other melancholy time, after I left you and before I came back, and of the changes it has brought along with it, we will talk some other day—I trust there are many days for us ahead."

And so they remained speaking of the incidents of that mysterious former 

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