"Afraid it is, Liane, if what you feared was that a blow on the head had bumped my right mind back to its throne."
Slowly and with a bitter smile the woman repeated the English phrase: "'A blow on the head!' . . ."
"That's what did the trick for me--and I don't mind telling you it hurt like the devil."
"But what of the blow to my heart?" Her closed hand smote Liane's breast. "You complain with reason of having been robbed of seven months of memory; but what of me, who stand to lose seven months of memories?"
"Pardon?" Lanyard queried, politely dense.
"You loved me well in that time while you were your old, true self."
"Loved you, Liane? And forgot! Ah, no! you ask me to believe too much."
"It's no joke to forget an experience like that, something which one man in a million would be lucky to know once in his lifetime."
"I beg your pardon: I was counting in your unsuccessful lovers as well."
With an abrupt movement the woman started up, to pause with face averted and hands fast laced. As promptly Lanyard tumbled out of the berth.
"Forgive me, Liane," he said contritely. "I daresay I am a bit light-headed, it would be surprising if I weren't, considering that I've experienced something of a shock today, and not by any means a physical shock merely--and am still shaken from it. You can hardly demand rational behaviour of a revenant lately spewed back into life by a psychic earthquake. That it was a strictly private earthquake doesn't make its after-effects any the less unsettling."
"True: it is you rather who have me to forgive." With a spontaneous generosity that shamed him, Liane swung back to Lanyard and caught both his hands to her bosom. "In my sadness and pain I forget you cannot understand . . ."
"Then make me understand. I've no one else to look to--and it would be unkindness to leave me in the dark."
"But give me time to consider . . ." She let go his hands and sank into the room's one chair. "It is going to hurt me to tell you, Michael, even more than it will hurt you."
"Because, I think" . . . She studied him a while with troubled gaze . . . "I think you have gone back to the ways of thought that were yours seven months ago."
"And what is so deplorable in that? Ways of thought about what?"