electrical vitality of her overpowered him. Even before his illness he
had had moments--I think I have recorded one of them--when her ardent
strength paralyzed him with a sort of terror and these moments were more
frequent now.

There was, too, a real effort involved in presenting ideas to her
(intellectual ideas, if they may be so distinguished from emotional
ones). He didn't know, now, whether she had fully understood what he had
been driving at that day; whether anything had really got through to her
beyond a melancholy realization that his love had cooled. He had always
been aware of this effort, but in the days of his strength he hadn't
minded making it.

Now he was conscious of wishing for some one like Mary,--indeed, for Mary
herself. They talked the same language, absolutely. Their minds had the
same index of refraction, so that thoughts flashed back and forth between
them effortlessly and without distortion. He thought of her so often and
wished for her so much during the first two days of his solitude that it
seemed almost a case for the psychical research people when he got a
telegram from her.

It read: "Aunt Lucile worried you left alone especially traveling. Shall
you mind or will Paula if I come down and bring you back, Mary."

There was a situation made clear, at all events. He grinned over it as
he despatched his wire to her. "Perfectly unnecessary but come
straight along so that we can play together for a week or two before
starting home."

Play together is just what they did. Enough of his strength soon came
back to make real walks possible and during the second week, with a
two-horse team and a side-bar buggy, they managed, without any ill
effect upon him, an excursion across the valley and up the opposite
mountainside to a log cabin road-house where they had lunch.

Mary, a born horsewoman, did the driving herself, thus relieving them of
the impediment to real companionship which a hired driver would have
been. In an inconsecutive, light-hearted way difficult to report
intelligibly, they managed to tell each other a lot. She let him see,
with none of the rhetorical solemnities which a direct statement would
have involved, her new awareness of his professional eminence. A dozen
innuendoes, as light as dandelion feathers, conveyed it to him; swift
brush-strokes of gesture and inflection sketched the picture in; an
affectionate burlesque of awe completed it, so that he could laugh at her
for it