He with his wife and young brood passing over Singing Ford into the district of broad-headed oaks, where there was low scrub of lupin and rhus, had met Daria setting snares in the rabbit runways. He had sung out a greeting to her, for the moment forgetting her state of forgetfulness, and she had stood up in the knee-high lupin with her hand across her eyes, taken unawares, and called him by his name. It had popped out, startling at sight of him like a rabbit from a burrow. Then as he stood still with astonishment she checked and stammered, recalled the word, protested that she had mistaken him for another, and at last broke and fled crying through the chaparral. The Outlier, a just man but a little slow, considered the circumstance, went on, in fact, a whole stage of his journey before he arrived at a conclusion. Whereupon he sent on his family toward home, and came back all the way to Deep Fern with his news, which had grown upon him momentously as he traveled. Daria remembered! How much?
Had the drink been made too light for her. Had the tumult of her mind resisted sleep. Or had her soul been so upborne by love that it floated clear of the drug that drowned her sense?
No one of the women had been with her when she recovered. Those whose custom it was to watch the Ward into wakefulness delicately withdrawing for the lover’s sake.
“Remember, oh remember,” he had insisted to the last, and she had remembered the name and face of a man not in her own district. How then would her memory stand toward familiar things?
This was disconcerting news indeed. There were some who blamed Persilope, who had poured out a portion of the drink. Others blamed the women for not staying by her. Trastevera blamed herself, and was tormented afresh, seeing as a departure from good usage of which she herself was source and center. Mancha and Herman found it another reason for pushing their idea, which the Hammerer by this time openly avowed. As if his admission of his passion had in a measure defined him to himself, he had shaken off the outward evidence of it, and was occupied chiefly in bringing his purpose to completion. He had not spoken to Zirriloë since his talk with Trastevera, sat no more mooning in the woods, but went about everywhere among the young men with Herman at his shoulder, making adherents.