but that halting of the
physical machinery to which we never give a thought during perfect
action--the weakness hanging leaden weights to every limb, the unwonted
nervousness and irritability, the apparently causeless necessity for
inaction--he was anything but a resigned man. Captain George, getting
his furlough and carrying him off, was blessed from the deepest heart of
the ward nurses. He had a kind of feeling that this his first illness
was a matter in which the universe should be concerned, and with that
fretful self-exaggeration came that other unutterable yearning that
attends the first proof that we are coheirs with others to the ills
flesh is heir to, weary homesickness and childish desire for sympathy.

So now, weakened physically with that strange new heartsickness,
paralyzing his will and giving freer scope to is feverish impatience,
George's careless words had rolled away the stone from the sepulchre,
and its prisoners were free. Not dead, not having lost a shade of color
from their wings, they nestled and gleamed through his heart, filling
the summer day with just such intangible perfect witchery as those other
days had been full of. Perhaps, too, time and absence had heightened the
charm. Imagination has such a way of catching up little scenes and words
and looks, and, without altering one of the facts, haloing them with
such a golden deceptive atmosphere, adding, day by day, faintest
touches, that they grow by and by into a something wholly different. So
that fortnight came back to him, an illuminated poem, along rich strains
of music, making every nerve thrill with the pleasure-pain of its
associations.

And by degrees, as the tide of sensation, thinned itself, lying back
with closed eyes, while the long train swept on through the torrid day,
separate pictures came before his inner sight. Just as keen and clear
were they as when they first fell on his vision. He had not blurred nor
dimmed their outlines with frequent recalling and suggestions of
difference.

A narrow strip of gray sand, ribbed with the wave wash to the very foot
of the reddish brown bowlders that bounded it. Standing thereon a
slender woman's figure, clad in quiet gray. The face was turned toward
him--a dark, unflushed face, with calm, fixed mouth, and clear gray eyes
under straight-drawn brows and long, separate, lashes. Fine, lustreless,
silky hair was pushed back into a net glittering with shining specks
under the narrow-brimmed s