She heard the girl murmur joyfully: "Gracas a Deus, elh' abria lhes olhas!" Iris was still wandering in that strange borderland guarded by unknown forces that lies between conscious life and the sleep that is so close of kin to death.

If in full possession of her senses, she might not have caught the drift of the sentence, since it was spoken in a guttural patois.

But now she understood beyond cavil that because she had opened her eyes, the girl was giving thanks to the Deity.

The first definite though bewildering notion that perplexed her faculties, at once clouded and unnaturally clear, was an astonished acceptance of the fact that she knew what the strange girl had said, though the phrase only remotely resembled its Spanish equivalent.

She gathered its exact meaning, word for word, and it was all the more surprising that both women should smile and say something quite incomprehensible as soon as Iris lifted herself on an elbow and asked in English: "Where am I?
How did I come here ?" [Illustration: "How did I come here ?"] Then she remembered, and memory brought a feeling of helplessness not wholly devoid of self-reproach.