Miss Hildreth laughed again, and wiping her slender finger-tips upon a tiny square of lace and muslin, from whose folds an odour of violets stole forth, she answered in an even lighter tone: "My dear Philip, let me recommend to you a certain essay on the 'Art of Forgetting,' if you have not already read it. It is written by a modern philosopher, it is true, but nevertheless, he sounds the heights and depths of our social system, and evolves a theory therefrom for which he should receive an universal peerage, bestowed upon him by his indebted fellow-sufferers. In the art of forgetting lies one's only chance of freedom from remorse for the past, and the inconveniences of the future. Believe me, if we can only master thoroughly this hitherto neglected art, we need have no further fears either for our digestions or complexions. It was, I think, old Sir Piers who said that all one's nightmares, physical or moral, arose from one of two causes, an unruly liver, or a too vivid memory; let us give the old man the credit of the aphorism, in any case." "Since you are so willingly blind, Patricia," cried Philip, roused from his apparent calm by the cool impertinence of her replies, "it seems a pity to force you to recall a past that dates back ten years. And yet I fear I must do so, for there are certain things that had better be explained between us now. Who knows but twice ten years may come and go before we meet again?" He paused for a moment, but she made him no reply; her face and slim graceful figure were thrown into high relief against the dark hazel-trees, her silks and laces lay about her feet in careless profusion across the short green turf, her hands were folded in the lace scarf that wrapped her neck in its fleecy folds. Afar off in the darkness of the drooping branches, an owl hooted, and a bird or two answered in sleepy half-notes. "It is not so very long ago," Philip continued, "since a letter came to me from you." She shivered a little and drew her laces about her more closely. "In that letter, Patricia, you had forgotten nothing; not one detail of the dream we dreamed together ten years ago. You wrote from your heart then; your heart that will sometimes make its cry heard, despite the crust of worldly artifice and selfishness you have built up upon it, and you appealed to me to recall the old days, 'to fold back the cere-cloth from the face of our dead past,' and see if something of beauty and sentiment did not still cling to its memory." She put up one hand to her face and passed it hurriedly across her trembling lips; she did not speak, but her eyes grew large and dark in their entreaty. Mr. Tremain continued, unheeding either her eyes or gesture.