he stress of his constant vigilance; he was able to cast off the bond
which enslaves the physician to his patient, and which he must ignore at
times for mere self-preservation's sake; but there was always a lurking
anxiety, which, though he refused to let it define itself to him,
shortened the time and space he tried to put between them.

One afternoon in April, when he left her sleeping, he was aware of
somewhat recklessly placing himself out of reach in a lonely excursion
to a village demolished by the earthquake of 1887, and abandoned
himself, in the impressions and incidents of his visit to the ruin, to a
luxury of impersonal melancholy which the physician cannot often allow
himself. At last, his care found him, and drove him home full of a
sharper fear than he had yet felt since the first days. But Mr. Gerald
was tranquilly smoking under a palm in the hotel garden, and met him
with an easy smile. "She woke once, and said she had had such a pleasant
dream. Now she's off again. Do you think we'd better wake her for
dinner? I suppose she's getting up her strength in this way. Her
sleeping so much is a good symptom, isn't it?"

Lanfear smiled forlornly; neither of them, in view of the possible
eventualities, could have said what result they wished the symptoms to
favor. But he said: "Decidedly I wouldn't wake her"; and he spent a
night of restless sleep penetrated by a nervous expectation which the
morning, when it came, rather mockingly defeated.

Miss Gerald appeared promptly at breakfast in their pavilion, with a
fresher and gayer look than usual, and to her father's "Well, Nannie,
you _have_ had a nap, this time," she answered, smiling:

"Have I? It isn't afternoon, is it?"

"No, it's morning. You've napped it all night."

She said: "I can't tell whether I've been asleep or not, sometimes; but
now I know I have been; and I feel so rested. Where are we going
to-day?"

She turned to Lanfear while her father answered: "I guess the doctor
won't want to go very far, to-day, after his expedition yesterday
afternoon."

"Ah," she said, "I _knew_ you had been somewhere! Was it very far? Are
you too tired?"

"It was rather far, but I'm not tired. I shouldn't advise Possana,
though."

"Possana?" she repeated. "What is Possana?"

He told her, and then at a jealous look in her eyes he added an account
of his excursion. He heightened, if anything, its difficulties, in
making light of them as no difficulties for him