-house passed; the gay,
exhilarating little drive had been taken to the hotel, through white
streets, past white-roofed houses buried in trees and flowers and vines;
the sick woman lay quiet and happy on her bed, drawn to the open window,
where the healing of the breeze touched her gently, and where her eyes
dreamed over a fairy stretch of sea and islands. Katherine, moving about
the room, unpacking, came to sit in a chair by her mother and talk to
her for a moment.

"To-morrow, if you're a good child, you shall go for a drive. Think--a
drive in an enchanted island. It's Shakespeare's _Tempest_ island,--did
I tell you I heard that on the boat? We might run across Caliban any
minute, and I think at least we'll find 'M' and 'F', for Miranda and
Ferdinand, cut into the bark of a tree somewhere. We'll go for a drive
every day, every single day, till we find it. You'll see."

Mrs. Newbold's eyes moved from the sea and rested, perplexed, on her
daughter. "Katherine, how can we afford to drive every day? How can we
be here at all? I don't understand it. I'm sure there was nothing left
to sell except the land out west, and Mr. Seaton told us last spring
that it was worthless. How did you and Randolph conjure up the money for
this beautiful journey that is going to save my life?"

The girl bent impulsively and kissed her with tender roughness. "It is
going to do that--it is!" she cried, and her voice broke. Then: "Never
mind how the money came, dear,--invalids mustn't be curious. It strains
their nerves. Wait till you're well and perhaps you'll hear a tale about
that land out west."

Day after day slipped past in the lotus-eating land whose unreality
makes it almost a change of planets from every-day America. Each day
brought health with great rapidity, and soon each day brought new
friends. Mrs. Newbold was full of charm, and the devotion between the
ill mother and the blooming daughter was an attractive sight. Yet the
girl was not light-hearted. Often the mother, waking in the night, heard
a shivering sigh through the open door between their rooms; often she
surprised a harassed look in the young eyes which, with all that the
family had gone through, was new to them. But Katherine laughed at
questions, and threw herself so gayly into the pleasures which came to
her that Mrs. Newbold, too happy to be analytical, let the straws pass
and the wind blow where it would.

There came a balmy morning when the two were to take, wit