“There, look at that. There are my roses, not wilted yet; and there is my Petrarch. There’s no drunk about me. I was here yesterday. I remember everything: only I forget some of it. Oh,—oh, Miss Ethel, what has happened?” “Just this: you have been ill, but you are getting well now.” “There now, you’re telling the truth. But when have I been ill, and where have I been ill?” said he, reassured, yet with the anger of a proud man fighting against the treachery of his faculties. “Look here. That’s—_that’s_ Mrs. Mancredo that I hear crying somewhere. It breaks me all up to have that woman so unhappy. Come, Miss Ethel, if you believe in prayer, down on your knees, and tell them up there to keep paralysis off a fellow like me. I’m not half a bad lot, I tell you. No, indeed; I’m not half bad.” At last Ethel brought him to see that if he would submit to patient thought he would soon bridge the mental hiatus that now afflicted him, since his mind had been abstracted from things about him. But that only made him anxious to have one good fight with the best fellow there, to prove that there was nothing the matter with him, and never had been. “Well, then, take me,” said Daniel Daksha, coming up; his presence so full of blessed content that Reginald laid his hand in that man’s with a comforted sense that “old Heem,” as he was sometimes called, would see him through all right. It was held to be desirable that Reginald should be saved from the sudden shock of the knowledge that as thirty odd years had been blotted out of his memory at the time of his paralysis, so now at this crisis of probable recovery the years which had since intervened, with their life of other worldliness and other consciousness, were swept away for the moment, like a dream forgotten. Daniel’s full comprehension of a brief but similar lapse from consciousness that had once befallen him, prepared him to help Reginald thoroughly. Reginald was singularly, courteously grateful for the care which he saw had been taken of him, in bringing him to this private home. But his mind was full of shadowy incidents related to the two worlds in which he had lived. And Daniel well knew the terrors and mental perils of a man recently returned as from a far country. He knew Reginald Grove felt badgered and broken-hearted at the incongruous, conflicting memories which bewildered him; and he felt that presently, when Reginald should begin to recall the blissful states of existence now left behind him as in a dreamland, he would fall into conditions of homesickness for those states of exaltation, which might result in settled melancholia or suicide.