comfort was quickly gone, however, and he rose to look out of the broad-silled window at the valley below.
The grass waved and glistened in the moonlight. In the distance, the circle of woods enclosed it, like a dark horizon line. The moon had mounted higher, but its slanting rays were not yet entering his chamber. No living thing moved within sight. The quiet of the scene increased the drowsiness of which he had hardly been aware, so that he found it hard to keep awake until his sleepy fingers had performed their task of undressing, and he was in bed.
Strangely, however, he did not fall asleep. Instead, he lay with utter restfulness, watching the dance of firelight and shadows on the high ceiling. He was conscious of the slow approach of the moonlight, through the window. He was gratefully aware of the dark woods outside, the waving grass. . . .
His mind smoothed itself out. Emotion left him. Awake, tolerantly receptive of whatever might come, he seemed to himself at the pinnacle of the years, with life graciously falling away on either side. For the first time, it might have been said of the doctor that his mind was free. Nothing tapped at its door.
Gently, and with infinite gradation, then, into that free mind came memory—memory without emotion; memory which he had prayed and struggled for, in bitter night watches, but which he now received with calmness,
He knew this valley. Of course, he knew it. He had been a boy, not far from here. On his way to the village, he had passed regularly through the valley, had stopped at this house, had even spent the night here, many times. Surely, there was nothing in his after life as familiar as this place! It was curious—but he thought this apathetically—that he should not have remembered it until now.
That was as far as his mind would go, for the time. It pieced together a thousand incidents of his boyhood, and made them more real than the trees or the moonlight. It made them vivid, but declined to go beyond them. Instead, it took a prodigious jump, and began to associate itself with his later life—the life he had remembered all along.
Yet in this nemonic chamber there was a difference, too. He discovered within himself an astonishing new facility at pushing out its walls. His recollections had never extended to the days prior to his second school life. Now, he was able to proceed farther. He saw himself undergoing insistent coaching, at the hands of expert professors, until, bit by bit, his early education was reestablished, though memory of early things had not come with it.
He made an effort—his mind seemed astonishingly acrobatic—and remembered long days and nights in a hospital, where he had been not a doctor but a patient. They were vague days and nights, merging on the nearer side into his phase of education, on the other, dwindling off into obscurity. No effort of his could bring light into that obscurity; but within it, at first dimly, then with sharper definition as he came into charted waters, he could see his mother's face.
He saw it there, not with the expression of mingled pain and triumph it had worn in later years, but struggling, struggling. . . .
He spent freely of that restful period, between sleep and waking, in fascinated observance of her face; watching its incessant battling, as it fought its way through misery and despair to ultimate victory. He knew the battle had been for him, but why he could not tell. In one flash of vivid vision, he saw himself coping terrifically with the specter of insanity. He saw marching columns of dead men—ancestors of his, who had lived bravely—coming to fight by his side. They were conjured up by his mother, who agonized with him on her knees at his bedside.
He saw them, and knew that with their aid—with her aid—he had won; but these were his Pillars of Hercules on that side. He could not see beyond them.
There was a little period when he lay, with dulling thoughts, almost asleep. He shut his eyes, and communed pleasantly with his mind. He opened them to find his memory back at the boyhood days, working forward from the place where it had left him before.
Suddenly, emotion came with it—hot, palpitating emotion. Lucia! How could he have forgotten her for an instant? He sat up in bed, and stared about the room. This was the house. She had come to live with her grandparents. He had met her here.
Then, one after another, like silver bells, they returned to him: the hours he had spent with her. Nothing was omitted; her lightest words were not too trifling to be remembered. They came back with the brilliance of summer days, the glamour of moonlit nights. He recalled the very trees they had walked among. He remembered a path, back of the house, which they had used. Had there been more light, he could have found it then. He determined to look for it in the morning.
Once, he laughed aloud, when, recollecting a tall pine which had been a landmark with them, he saw its top through the window against the sky, towering above the black line of trees. Nothing was lost; nothing. The past was all his. There was one night, one lovely night. . . .
The vision ceased, and sleep came, like the snapping of a thread; but with it, dreams. They were vague, confused dreams, shot through with mystery. His sense of restfulness was gone. It was replaced by a murky foreboding.
Something began calling him, from far away; something terrible, though remote. It approached, with marching footsteps. He, too, was advancing, through the corridors of sleep to meet it. He struggled as he went, and averted his face. He awoke, at last, with the sweat of a chill horror upon him.
There was no transition stage. He was broad awake, at once—awake, and an old man again. He was an old man, whose bones ached, and he was staring, with eyes heavy with terror, at an incredible thing.
Moonlight flooded the room. It came through a great gap in the roof. There was no fire in the fireplace, no tapestry on the wall. The wardrobe doors had fallen from rusty hinges. He straightened painfully on one elbow, to find that the bed on which he had been lying was little more than a frame, spanned by worm-eaten slats. A tarnished candlestick, without a candle, stood on the mantel. The room was in ruins.
Half-blinded by the staggering horror which enveloped him, he stumbled into his clothes and groped his way to the door. Though he had bolted it before going to bed, it was open, hanging from one hinge.
The moonlight entered the hall, for most of the roof was gone. Somehow, with great jumps down the broken stairway, he reached the lower floor, and his steps brought him to the room where the two of them had spent their pleasant evening.
The moon shone here, too. It showed him a ruined fireplace, a stone floor, four blackened walls.
For a moment, his eyes wandered to and fro, regarding the room with nightmare fascination; then he turned, mechanically, and walked down the ruinous hall, through the crumbling doorway, into the valley. He knew this for reality. He had come, the night before to this burned house; he had sat on that remnant of a bench, before that cold fireplace; he had lain, and felt that
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