Unfortunately, the colonel's fondly cherished hope that the shock to his daughter's system would entail no after consequences was not destined to be fulfilled. To all appearance, Anna had regained her health and strength in full measure, and her fright was a matter six months old, when, without any warning, so to speak, an unaccountable change came over her which found its physical expression in a state of irritability and low fever, supplemented by insomnia. Dr. Carew was called in, and prescribed, but declined to commit himself to any expression of opinion. On the fifth day from the beginning of her attack, Anna fell into a deep, trance-like sleep which lasted eighteen hours. When at length she awoke, everything that had happened to her during the six months which had intervened since the date of her fright was lost to her memory. She went back and took up her life again at the point where consciousness had left her at the moment of her scare in the gallery. All Mrs. Jenwyn had taught her in the interim was clean gone. A book half read at the time she now began afresh and finished, and she resumed the practice of a piece of music on which she had been engaged during the forenoon of that unfortunate day. The break in her memory was absolute and complete. By Dr. Carew's recommendation, no attempt was made to enlighten her. Everybody about her accommodated themselves to circumstances as she believed them to be. The doctor trusted to time. It was all he could do. Any attempt at a cure on his part, as he was not slow to recognize, might have been productive of more harm than good, and possibly have entailed consequences he would have been loath to face. He watched the case with the deepest interest, but beyond prescribing a harmless draft or two, he left nature to work after her own fashion. At the end of a fortnight Anna fell into another trance-like sleep, and awoke from it her proper self. The two preceding weeks were blotted from her memory. She had merely had a longer and sounder sleep than ordinary, from which she had awaked feeling strangely refreshed. From that time forward the same thing had happened to her, at irregular intervals, every three or four months. After certain preliminary symptoms, which hardly ever varied, she would fall into a deep sleep, always to awake at that moment of her life which preceded her meeting with the supposed apparition in the gallery. At the end of ten days or a fortnight, and after another sleep, she would become her normal self again.