"I have tried; I do try; but I can only conjure up a confused mass of
shifting images; things I seem to have been and to have done, all
indistinguishably mixed with what I have only dreamed or hoped to do
and be."
"How strange!" she said again, fixing her wide-open dark eyes upon him,
and then turning her gaze to the sea beyond; "but it will come to you in
time."
"Heavens!" he exclaimed, energetically, "I hope so, else I shall regret
that you pulled me out of the water. To-day I do seem to have a glimpse
of something more tangible. Since I sat here I almost thought I
remembered--"
He broke off suddenly, his bright look fading into an expression of
helpless annoyance.
"What?" cried Columbine, eagerly.
"I cannot tell," he groaned. "It is all gone."
"Oh, what a pity!" exclaimed she, springing to her feet in a flush of
sympathy and baffled curiosity. "Oh, how cruel!"
Then she remembered that she was absolutely disobeying the doctor's
orders, and was allowing her patient to become excited.
"There, there," she said, "how wrong of me to let you worry! Everything
will come back to you when you are stronger. Now it is time for your
luncheon. It is so warm and bright you may have it here if you will
promise not to bother your head. For I really think," she added, wisely,
giving his wraps a deft touch or two, "that the best way to remember is
not to try."
"I dare say you are right," he agreed. "At least trying doesn't seem to
accomplish much."
She flitted away, to return a moment or two later with an old-fashioned
salver, upon which, in dainty china two or three generations old, Sarah
had arranged the invalid's luncheon. She drew the rustic table up to his
side and served him, while he ate with that mixture of eagerness and
disinclination which marks the appetite of one in the early stages of
a convalescence.
"That pitcher," he observed, carelessly, as she poured out the cream,
"ought to belong to my past. It has a familiar look, as if it could
claim acquaintance if it would only deign."
"It was my grandmother's," Columbine said. "When we were little, Cousin
Tom used to tease me by saying my cheeks looked like those of that fat
face on the handle. I was more buxom then than now."
Instead of replying, her companion laid down his spoon and looked at her
in delighted amaze. Then he struck his hands together with sudden vigor.
"Tom!" he cried. "Tom!"
"Well?" queried she, looking at him as if he had gone distraught. "It
isn't so strange a name, is it?"
"But, don't you see?" he exclaimed, joyously,--"I'm Tom! I have found my
name!"
III.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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