He sighed again, turned on his back, and opened his eyes.

He saw her face hanging over him--upside down, it seemed. Yet even
inverted, and seen through the mists of sleep, that face conveyed
something which he did not understand, something so strange that he
caught his breath, gasping, and blundered to his feet.

The girl still sat, looking up at him.

"What is it?" he asked, sharply.

But Amaryllis had forgotten herself altogether, and did not know that he
found his wonder in her face.

"What is what?" she asked, simply.

"Your face----" he began, and could find no more words.

"My face," she echoed, puzzled, and feeling blindly for a handkerchief.
"It's all right, isn't it?"

"It's glorious--shining with happiness," he answered, his voice sounding
like that of a man in pain.

"Weren't you glad," asked Amaryllis, "when you'd got me off to sleep,
and when I woke up all alive again? I know it didn't make you look
anything but stern and pre-occupied and business-like; I felt as if you
were pleased, though. I'm different, and show things in my face, I
suppose."

"But you were looking like that when I opened my eyes."

"Well?" said Amaryllis.

"You hadn't had time to know whether I was well or ill, strong or weak.
And you looked as if it had been there a long time."

"What?" she asked again.

"The--the expression," said Dick, his tone as fierce as his words were
lame.

Very sweetly, and with no taint of derision in the sweetness, Amaryllis
laughed.

"The gloriousness? I'd been watching you all the time, you see, and I
knew it was doing you lots of good--and--and I was proud of being
useful, perhaps. So, of course I looked happy and shining."

"When did you take my head on your knees?" he asked, sternly.

But this time she understood every furrow of his frown.

"As soon as you were asleep," she answered.

He looked at his watch. It was four o'clock.

"And I never moved?" he asked.

"No."

"Nor you?"

"No, Dick."

"An hour and a quarter! My God!" he exclaimed, "you must be as stiff as
a pious book. And I'm damned if you're not sitting there because you
can't get up!"

"Oh, yes, I could. But give me a hand," she answered; and he pulled her
to her feet.

She staggered, and he caught her by an elbow.

"One of them's as fast asleep as you were," she said. "It'll go off in a
minute."

But for Dick Bellamy, caught at last on the ebb of his resistance, one
elbow was not enough. So he seized