a sea-green grape leaf, she looked
directly at the woman who brought it to the bed.

"How still this house is!" she said, and flushed with weakness, for it
was her first real sentence, and it occurred to her that only little
sighs of fatigue or groans of relief and halting exclamations of, "That
feels good," or "No more, thanks," had passed her lips.

The woman smiled. She wore a straight gown of some cool stripe of
white and grey and her eyes were grey.

"We live in a quiet place," she said, and lifted the pillows higher.

But it seemed that after that--perhaps it was because she listened--she
began to hear faint sounds. The clear falling of poured out water, and
the tinkling of dish on dish, now and then, and later, the soft murmur
of exchanging women's voices.

Another day she spoke of the freshness of her morning egg, and that
afternoon she leaned nearer the casement to catch the cluck of a
motherly hen with her brood, and smiled at the scurry of wing and feet
as grain was scattered somewhere.

It must have been at that time that the doctor came up to see her, a
big brown man, whose beard hid his smile when he chose, but nothing
could cover the keen, reading beam of the eye.

"I see you are doing well," he said.

"It is wonderful," she answered him, "but I am sure it is not the
world."

"The world is very large," he said, and went away.

"And I never asked about--about anybody," she murmured, her eyes
filling, "but I am sure they are all right, or he would have said!"

She was ashamed, afterward, to remember for how long she had thought
the woman who attended on her a servant. And yet she did think her so
until the morning when it suddenly occurred to her that it was not
possible any ordinary servant should be so deft and self-contained at
once: servants were not so calm--that was it, so calm. Even the best
of them were hurried and anxious, and if they were old and valued, they
got on one's nerves the more: one had to consider them. Of course,
this was a trained nurse. She had decided suddenly that she felt equal
to rising for her bath, and congratulated herself on discerning the
nurse in time, for now she could ask for help, if she needed it.

"If you will show me the bathroom," she said, "and will be there to
help me over the edge of the tub, in case I feel weak----"

"I will be there," said the woman, "but I must get it ready: the tub is
not high."

And when she stepped into the next room s