A Sleep and a Forgetting by William Dean Howells

Such return of memory as she now had was like memory in what we call the lower lives. It increased, fluctuantly, with an ebb in which it almost disappeared, but with a flow that in its advance carried it beyond its last flood-tide mark. After the first triumph in which she could address Lanfear by his name, and could greet her father as her father, there were lapses in which she knew them as before, without naming them. Except mechanically to repeat the names of other people when reminded of them, she did not pass beyond cognition to recognition. Events still left no trace upon her; or if they did she was not sure whether they were things she had dreamed or experienced. But her memory grew stronger in the region where the bird knows its way home to the nest, or the bee to the hive. She had an unerring instinct for places where she had once been, and she found her way to them again without the help from the association which sometimes failed Lanfear. Their walks were always taken with her father's company in his carriage, but they sometimes left him at a point of the Berigo Road, and after a long detour among the vineyards and olive orchards of the heights above, rejoined him at another point they had agreed upon with him. One afternoon, when Lanfear had climbed the rough pave of the footways with her to one of the summits, they stopped to rest on the wall of a terrace, where they sat watching the changing light on the sea, through a break in the trees.

The shadows surprised them on their height, and they had to make their way among them over the farm paths and by the dry beds of the torrents to the carriage road far below. They had been that walk only once before, and Lanfear failed of his reckoning, except the downward course which must bring them out on the high-road at last. But Miss Gerald's instinct saved them where his reason failed. She did not remember, but she knew the way, and she led him on as if she were inventing it, or as if it had been indelibly traced upon her mind and she had only to follow the mystical lines within to be sure of her course. She confessed to being very tired, and each step must have increased her fatigue, but each step seemed to clear her perception of the next to be taken.

Suddenly, when Lanfear was blaming himself for bringing all this upon her, and then for trusting to her guidance, he recognized a certain peasant's house, and in a few moments they had descended the olive-orchard terraces to a broken cistern in the clear twilight beyond the dusk. She suddenly halted him. "There, there! It happened then -- now -- this instant!"

"What?"

"That feeling of being here before! There is the curb of the old cistern; and the place where the terrace wall is broken; and the path up to the vineyard -- Don't you feel it, too? " she demanded, with a joyousness which had no pleasure for him.

"Yes, certainly. We were here last week. We went up the path to the farm-house to get some water."

"Yes, now I am remembering -- remembering! " She stood with eagerly parted lips, and glancing quickly round with glowing eyes, whose light faded in the same instant. "No! " she said, mournfully, "it's gone."

A sound of wheels in the road ceased, and her father's voice called: "Don't you want to take my place, and let me walk awhile, Nannie?"

"No. You come to me, papa. Something very strange has happened; something you will be surprised at. Hurry! " She seemed to be joking, as he was, while she beckoned him impatiently towards her.

He had left his carriage, and he came up with a heavy man's quickened pace. "Well, what is the wonderful thing? " he panted out.

She stared blankly at him, without replying, and they silently made their way to Mr. Gerald's carriage.

"I lost the way, and Miss Gerald found it," Lanfear explained, as he helped her to the place beside her father.

She said nothing, and almost with sinking into the seat, she sank into that deep slumber which from time to time overtook her.

"I didn't know we had gone so far -- or rather that we had waited so long before we started down the hills," Lanfear apologized in an involuntary whisper.

"Oh, it's all right," her father said, trying to adjust the girl's fallen head to his shoulder. "Get in and help me -- "

Lanfear obeyed, and lent a physician's skilled aid, which left the cumbrous efforts of her father to the blame he freely bestowed on them. "You'll have to come here on the other side," he said. "There's room enough for all three. Or, hold on! Let me take your place. " He took the place in front, and left her to Lanfear's care, with the trust which was the physician's right, and with a sense of the girl's dependence in which she was still a child to him.

They did not speak till well on the way home. Then the father leaned forward and whispered huskily: "Do you think she's as strong as she was?"

Lanfear waited, as if thinking the facts over. He murmured back: "No. She's better. She's not so strong."

"Yes," the father murmured. "I understand."