"Splendidly. But I was very tired last night; I don't know why, exactly." "We had rather a long walk." "Did we have a walk yesterday?" "Yes." "Then it was _so_! I thought I had dreamed it. I was beginning to remember something, and my father asked me what it was, and then I couldn't remember. Do you believe I shall keep on remembering?" "I don't see why you shouldn't." "Should you wish me to?" she asked, in evident, however unconscious, recurrence to their talk of the day before. "Why not?" She sighed. "I don't know. If it's like some of those dreams or gleams. Is remembering pleasant?" Lanfear thought for a moment. Then he said, in the honesty he thought best to use with her: "For the most part I should say it was painful. Life is tolerable enough while it passes, but when it is past, what remains seems mostly to hurt and humiliate. I don't know why we should remember so insistently the foolish things and wrong things we do, and not recall the times when we acted, without an effort, wisely and rightly." He thought he had gone too far, and he hedged a little. "I don't mean that we _can't_ recall those times. We can and do, to console and encourage ourselves; but they don't recur, without our willing, as the others do." She had poured herself a cup of coffee, and she played with the spoon in her saucer while she seemed to listen. But she could not have been listening, for when she put down her spoon and leaned back in her chair, she said: "In those dreams the things come from such a very far way back, and they don't belong to a life that is like this. They belong to a life like what you hear the life after this is. We are the same as we are here; but the things are different. We haven't the same rules, the same wishes--I can't explain." "You mean that we are differently conditioned?" "Yes. And if you can understand, I feel as if I remembered long back of this, and long forward of this. But one can't remember forward!" "That wouldn't be remembrance; no, it would be prescience; and your consciousness here, as you were saying yesterday, is through knowing, not remembering." She stared at him. "Was that yesterday? I thought it was--to-morrow." She rubbed her hand across her forehead as people do when they wish to clear their minds. Then she sighed deeply. "It tires me so. And yet I can't help trying." A light broke over her face at the sound of a step on the gravel walk near by, and she said, laughing, without looking round: "That is papa! I knew it was his step." V