ght air that bathed them had an
ironic significance.

He had arrived with Paula at this paradise early in the week, pretty well
exhausted with the ordinary fatigues of less than a day's journey in the
train. They were feeding him bouillon, egg-nogs and cream. On Paula's arm
he had managed this afternoon, his first walk, a matter of two or three
hundred yards about the hotel gardens, and at the end of it had been glad
to subside, half reclining into this easy chair, placed so that through
the open door and the veranda it gave upon, he could enjoy the view of
the color-drenched mountain-side.

He had dismissed Paula peremptorily for a real walk of her own. He had
told her, in simple truth, that he would enjoy being left to himself for
a while. She had taken this assurance for an altruistic mendacity, but
she had yielded at last to his insistence and gone, under an exacted
promise not to come back for at least an hour.

It offered some curious compensations though, this state of
helplessness--a limpidity of vision, clairvoyant almost. For a fortnight
he had been like a spectator sitting in the stalls of a darkened theatre
watching the performances upon a brilliantly lighted stage,
himself--himselves among the characters, for there was a past and a
future self for him to look at and ponder upon. The present self hardly
counted. All the old ambitions, desires, urgencies, which had been his
impulsive forces were gone--quiescent anyhow. He was as sexless, as cool,
as an image carved in jade.

And he was here in this lover's paradise--this was what drew the tribute
of a smile to the humor of the high gods--with Paula. And Paula was more
ardently in love with him than she had ever been before.

The quality of that smile must have carried over to the one he gave her
when she came back, well within her promised hour, from her walk. One
couldn't imagine anything lovelier or more inviting than the picture she
made framed in that doorway, coolly shaded against the bright blaze that
came in around her. She looked at him from there, for a moment,
thoughtfully.

"I don't believe you have missed me such a lot after all," she said.
"What have you been doing all the while?"

"Crystal-gazing," he told her.

She came over to him and took his hands, a caress patently enough through
the nurse's pretext that she was satisfying herself that he had not got
cold sitting there. She relinquished them suddenly, readjusted his rug
and pillow