ndition. After a sickness you
plump up, you get back your color, and all the while you can be so weak
you could burst out crying if any one pointed a finger at you. You're
trembling with nervousness this minute. You're all sunk together, as if
your backbone couldn't hold you up. It's because the weakness of your
illness is still on you, as anybody could see. Now you listen to what
I've got to say. The wisest thing you can do, young man, instead of
keeping away and having ideas and waiting till these gradually wear
off--the best thing you can do, I say, is to stay right at my side and
get sobered up by contact with things as they actually are. Not only the
best thing, but a lot fairer to me, doesn't it seem so to you? How do
you think I like to have you go kiting off the moment I've got you back
again? When I've missed you so! Now, Geraldino, rely on Auroretta. Let
her manage this case. Don't you be afraid; she'll cure you in two
frisks."

"It just might be, you know, that you were right," said Gerald,
dubiously, with the modesty of tone that would beseem a girl after a
bucket of cold water had quelled her hysterics. "The truth is you do not
appear to me this evening at all as I have been carrying you in my
remembrance."

Aurora laughed and reinforced her expression of jolly
matter-of-factness, looking into his eyes with eyes of sanative fun.

He looked back at her with meditative scrutiny, one eyebrow raised a
little above the other.

She had reigned in his thoughts very largely in her appearance of his
nurse, with her soft, loose robes, the blue of pensive twilights, her
fair hair in easy-feeling braids, her white hands bare of ornaments. She
sat near him now in a snug satin dinner-dress full of whalebones and
hooks and eyes. It had elbow sleeves terminating in full frills of
Duchess lace; a square-cut neck, likewise be-laced, framing an open
space in part obscured again by a jeweled medallion on a gold chain. She
had on rings and bracelets, a bow-knot in her hair. She had in fact
"dressed up" for Tom Bewick, wishing him to see with his eyes what good
she got out of the fortune with whose origin he was acquainted.

"Gracious goodness!" She bounced to her feet. "Here I was forgetting!
Gerald," she said in haste, "I'm sorry, but we'll have to go indoors.
They'll be wondering where I am, and starting the hunt for me."

"They? You have guests?"

"Only one. Come in, Gerald. I want you to meet him. You've heard me
s