been quite usual. Time
dragged with him, but the calendar told him that just so many days, no
more, had passed. He pictured her going her cheerful gait, occasionally
saying, perhaps, "I wonder what has become of Stickly-prickly?"

He had not gone to the mid-Lent entertainment as a matter of course.
Aurora had shown small knowledge of him when she thought he would
consent to see her disport herself before the public as a negress. On
the day after, when he learned that she had been the star of the evening
as a negro, his frenzied disgust itself warned him of the injustice, the
impropriety, of exhibiting it to her. He chose to remain away until it
should have sufficiently worn down to be governable. By that time the
poor man had developed an illness, that cold of which for some weeks he
had been carrying around in his bones the premonition.

With reddened eyelids and thickened nose, a sore throat and a cough, he
felt himself no fit object for a lady's sight. He stayed in to take care
of himself.

Giovanna knew what to do for her _signorino_ when he was
_raffreddato_. She built a little fire in the studio; she brought
his light meals to him in his arm-chair before it. She administered
remedies. His bed was warmed at night by her _scaldino_. Gaetano
was sent to Vieusseux's for an armful of books. All day Gerald sat by
the fire and read, and sometimes dozed and dreamed, and read again. And
days passed, while his cold held on.

He thought of writing Aurora to tell her. But if he told her, she would
at once come to see him; of so much one could be sure. And he did not
want her to come. The eccentric fellow did not want her to come
precisely because he wanted her to come so much.

"This is the way it begins," he said to himself, with horror, when he
became fully aware that his nerves, now that he could not go to find
Aurora when he chose, were suggesting to him all the time that the
presence of Aurora was needed to quiet that sense of want, of
maladjustment to conditions, haunting him like the desire for sleep.

At sight of his danger he became very clear-headed. The man who sees a
snare and walks into it deserves his fate, surely.

"It is time to stop it," he said. And he laid down for himself new rules
of life.

Fortunately, he had at hand some absorbing books. Dostoiewsky's "Crime
and Punishment" could effectively take him out of himself.

But the print was fine and crowded, he was weakened by illness, he was
force