Remembering is a very slow progress when your mind is confused by serious illness, weakness, and the breaking off for a time of all threads of meaning in the mind. Meredith took it up again in the morning, though not with the momentary gleam of conviction which had flashed upon him; and he worked very hard at it, as he might have worked at a case in his practice for the Bar or a mathematical problem. But it was harder than either of those. He made out easily enough his meeting with Janet at Mimpriss’s, and guessed rather than remembered that he had walked home with her, and thus exposed himself to being knocked down at Mrs. Harwood’s door; but he did not make out until he had returned to the question--his faculties freshened by a night’s sleep, and the new energy of the morning--why it was that he had met Janet, or that there was any special reason for their meeting. It flashed upon him all at once that he had made the appointment; that he had written to her to ask her to meet him; and then he remembered all at once the papers and the mystery which the papers had thrown so little light upon. He half started from his couch with excitement when it burst upon him that he was under the same roof as the mysterious recluse in the wing: and thus laid himself open to a grave reproof from his attendant, who called upon him to recollect that he had been very ill, that his escape was half-miraculous, and that to put his health in jeopardy by suffering himself to get excited would be “more than criminal.” He believed that she meant scarcely less than criminal, but he was humble, and expressed the deepest penitence. “I was only thinking,” he said, “and something suddenly flashed upon me.” “Thinking is the very worst thing you could do,” said the nurse, severely, “and to have things flashing upon you is what I cannot allow. If it occurs again I must appeal to the doctor.” The nurse was a lady, so that he could not quench her as he would have done had she been Mrs. Gamp, and had to apologize again. But the compulsory pause did him good, for when he returned to the subject without any more starts and flashes, it all became clear to him again from the night of the ball upwards. The various events of that night came back like a picture to his mind. It had occupied him entirely in the short intervals that occurred between that discovery and the assault upon him at Mrs. Harwood’s door. Since then he had remembered nothing about it till now.