ked at each other without sign of recognition; then
scarcely aware of what she did she made him a carelessly gay salute with
her pruning-knife, clinging to the ladder with the other hand in sheer
fear of falling, so suddenly unsteady her limbs and body.

He went directly toward her; and she, her knees scarcely supporting her,
mounted the last rung of the ladder and seated herself sidewise on the
top of the wall, looking down at him, leaning on one arm.

"It is nice to see you out," she said, as he came to the foot of the
sunny wall.... "Do you really feel as thin as you look?... I had a letter
from your aunt to-day asking an outsider's opinion of your condition,
and now I'll be able to give it.... You do look pathetically thin--but I
shan't tell her that.... If you are tired standing up you may come into
my garden where there are some very agreeable benches.... I would like
to have you come if you care to."

She herself scarcely knew what she was saying; smile, voice, animation
were forced; the havoc of his illness stared at her from his sharp
cheek-bones, thin, bloodless hands, eyes still slow in turning, dull,
heavy-lidded.

"I thought perhaps you would come to call," he said listlessly.

She flushed.

"You _did_ come, once?"

"Yes."

"You did not come again while I was conscious, did you?"

"No."

He passed his thin hand across eyes and forehead.

She folded her arms under her breast and hung far over the
shadow-dappled wall half-screened in young vine-leaves. Over her pink
sun-bonnet and shoulders the hot spring sunshine fell; her face was in
shadow; his, under the full glare of the unclouded sky, every ravage
starkly revealed. And she could not turn her fascinated gaze or crush
out the swelling tenderness that closed her throat to speech and set her
eyes glimmering.

The lids closed, slowly; she leaned there without a word, living through
in the space of a dozen pulse-beats, the agony and sweetness of the
past; then laid her flushed cheek on her arms and opened her eyes,
looking at him in silence.

But he dared not sustain her gaze and took refuge from it in a forced
gaiety, comparing his reappearance to the return of Ulysses, where Dame
Art, that respectable old Haus-Frau, awaited him in a rocking-chair,
chastely preoccupied with her tatting, while rival architects squatted
anxiously around her, urging their claims to a dead man's shoes.

She strove to smile at him and to speak coolly: "Will you