ere my head is, and be perfectly
happy."

As seriously as if a god had commanded it, Aurora preserved the silence
and immobility requested of her, only making her shoulder as much wider
and softer and more comforting as she could by wanting it to be so.

When by and by she felt him slip a little as he began to lose himself in
sleep, she clasped her hands around him supportingly and held him in
place.

A single candle burned in the room, with a book to shade it. Aurora's
eyes, fixed and starry, rested upon the little flame where it was
reflected in a mirror on the wall opposite, but she did not see it at
all, so absorbed was she in her thoughts. In her feelings, too. In the
wonder of the hour. This remarkable Gerald, with his head packed full of
knowledge, with his speech that charmed you as whistling does an adder,
with his capacity to paint pictures that the rest could not even
understand, and then his rarity, the sweetness of his manners, the
fascination of all that unknown in him which came, she had concluded,
from his foreign bringing-up--he had wanted ever since he first saw her
just to lay his head on her shoulder and rest....

Her common ordinary shoulder. What did he see in her? Taking for granted
that he saw something, Aurora attributed this unknown quality in herself
to God, and thanked Him. She tightened her clasp about Gerald, the
better to feel him there. The power of the sleeping-potion had overtaken
him completely. Thoughts that moistened her eyes resulted from feeling
her arms full of the breathing warmth of a beloved form. Those defrauded
maternal arms! That other, who would have been five years old at this
time, and would have been called little Dan, after Dan, her big father,
how she would have nursed him through his childish ailments, how she
would have held him and rocked him! No, she would never stop yearning
over him. One must suppose that God knows best.

Gerald's breathing was deep and quiet. When sure that it could be done
without waking him, she let him gently down on to the pillow.

She stood beside the bed for a few minutes, in her soft garment of
cashmere and swansdown which made no more sound when she moved than did
her velvet shoes; she watched him sleep with emotions of gratitude
beyond possibility of expression to any one but that old intimate, God.
He was getting well so surely and fast. He would shortly be as well as
ever.

Confident that he would want nothing more for the res