sired greatly,
when they tired of reading, to rest his head in her lap and dream with
closed eyes about the future that was to be theirs. On Sunday picnics at
Shellmound Park and Schuetzen Park, in the past, he had rested his head
on many laps, and, usually, he had slept soundly and selfishly while the
girls shaded his face from the sun and looked down and loved him and
wondered at his lordly carelessness of their love. To rest his head in a
girl's lap had been the easiest thing in the world until now, and now he
found Ruth's lap inaccessible and impossible. Yet it was right here, in
his reticence, that the strength of his wooing lay. It was because of
this reticence that he never alarmed her. Herself fastidious and timid,
she never awakened to the perilous trend of their intercourse. Subtly
and unaware she grew toward him and closer to him, while he, sensing the
growing closeness, longed to dare but was afraid.

Once he dared, one afternoon, when he found her in the darkened living
room with a blinding headache.

"Nothing can do it any good," she had answered his inquiries. "And
besides, I don't take headache powders. Doctor Hall won't permit me."

"I can cure it, I think, and without drugs," was Martin's answer. "I am
not sure, of course, but I'd like to try. It's simply massage. I
learned the trick first from the Japanese. They are a race of masseurs,
you know. Then I learned it all over again with variations from the
Hawaiians. They call it _lomi-lomi_. It can accomplish most of the
things drugs accomplish and a few things that drugs can't."

Scarcely had his hands touched her head when she sighed deeply.

"That is so good," she said.

She spoke once again, half an hour later, when she asked, "Aren't you
tired?"

The question was perfunctory, and she knew what the answer would be. Then
she lost herself in drowsy contemplation of the soothing balm of his
strength: Life poured from the ends of his fingers, driving the pain
before it, or so it seemed to her, until with the easement of pain, she
fell asleep and he stole away.

She called him up by telephone that evening to thank him.

"I slept until dinner," she said. "You cured me completely, Mr. Eden,
and I don't know how to thank you."

He was warm, and bungling of speech, and very happy, as he replied to
her, and there was dancing in his mind, throughout the telephone
conversation, the memory of Browning and of sickly Elizabeth Barrett.