“Columbine?”

“Columbine Dysart.”

That he knew little more than before was a consequence of the situation, and Mistress Columbine was wise enough to spare him the necessity of saying so.

“You do not know us,” she said; “but we will take good care of you until you are well enough to hear all about it.”

“But—” he began, the puzzled look upon his wan face not at all dissipated.

“No,” she returned, “there is no ‘but’ about it. It is all right.”

“But,” he repeated with an insistence that would not be denied, “but—”

“Well?” queried she, seeing that something troubled him too much to be evaded.

“But who am I?” he demanded, so earnestly[18] that the absurdity of such a question was lost in its pathos.

[18]

“Who are you?” she echoed, in bewilderment. Then, with the instant reflection that he was still too near delirium and brain-fever to be allowed to trouble himself with speculations, she added, brightly, and with the air of one who settles all possible doubts, “Why, you are yourself, of course.”

She smiled so dazzlingly as she spoke that a complete faith in her assurances mingled itself with some dimly felt sense of the ludicrous in the sick man’s mind, and although the baffled look did not at once disappear from his face, yet he said nothing further, and not long after he fell asleep, leaving Columbine free to seek her arbor again and ponder on this new phase of her interesting case. She attached no serious importance then to the fact that her patient seemed so uncertain concerning his identity; but, as the days went by, and he was as completely unable to answer his own query as ever, a strange, baffled feeling stole over her; a teasing sense of being brought helplessly face to face with a mystery to which she had no key.

His convalescence was somewhat slow, the hurts he had received having been of a very serious nature; but when he was able to leave[19] his room, and even to accompany Columbine to her favorite arbor, he was still grappling vainly with the problem of who and what he 

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