it seemed improbable certainly that
midnight had seen him sleeping in her arms. But underlying their
laughter was a consciousness in each that day of a thing uniting them
which had not been there before.

* * * * *

Sitting bolstered up in bed to eat his first real meal, he looked, with
his long hair parted in the middle and brushed down over his hollow
temples, like one of those old masters in the Ewe-fitsy, Aurora told
him. A St. John the Baptist, she specified.

She chipped the top off his egg and cut finger sizes of bread for him,
so that he might have it in the foreign way he preferred.

While he languidly ate, yet with pleasure, the door softly swung inward,
revealing faces of women,--Estelle, Clotilde, Livvy, Giovanna,--all
equally kind, all craning for the delight of a peep at him eating his
soft-boiled egg.

Because he was still weak, tears came into his eyes, and because he
could not permit them to be seen, he waved and haggardly smiled toward
the smiling and nodding faces without inviting them nearer.

Women! women!... What a great deal of room they had occupied in his
life! How much he owed them for affection,--mother, sister,
servant-girl, friends....

* * * * *

He had known from whispers and rustlings, from a sort of instinct,
latterly from Giovanna's own lips, that his house since the coming of
"that lady" to undertake the government of his sickroom had been full of
people, making practical and easy the carrying out of her plots.
Abundance of people and abundance of money. Old Giovanna grumbled
bitterly at this invasion, but she did it inside of herself, sanely
recognizing that she had subject for gratitude. Her hot dark eye looked
all she thought, and her lips moved as she soundlessly said all she
felt; but when she dropped into the dark church of Santa Maria degli
Angeli for a moment's devotion she did not fail to ask Maria to bless
"that lady" and give her great good. After which she begged Her by the
seven swords of Her sorrow to hasten the day that should clear the house
of the whole horde of strangers, and permit her to resume the quiet life
with her signorino.

Gerald, whose nature felt the oppression of material benefits as much as
Giovanna felt jealousy with regard to her rights and loves, resolved
that the sole seemly return for generosity in this case would be an
equal generosity, consisting in an