all.

"And now, Dr. Billett, what would you say of my case?"

Ted's eyes are glowing--in the middle of her description his heart has
begun to knock to a hidden pulse, insistent and soft as the drum of
gloved fingers on velvet. He picks words carefully.

"I should say--Mrs. Severance--that there was something you needed and
wanted and didn't have at present. And that you would probably have
it--in the end."

She laughs a little. "Rather cryptic, isn't that, doctor? And you'd
prescribe?"

"Prescribe? 'It's an awkward matter to play with souls.'"

"'And trouble enough to save your own,'" she completes the quotation.
"Yes, that's true enough--though I'm sorry you can't even tell me to use
this twice a day in half a glass of water and that other directly after
each meal. I think I'll have to be a little more definite when it comes
to your turn--if it does come."

"Oh it will." But instead of beginning, he raises his eyes to her again.
This time there is a heaviness like sleep on both, a heaviness that
draws both together inaudibly and down, and down, as if they were
sinking through piled thickness on thickness of warm, sweet-scented
grass. Odd faces come into both minds and vanish as if flickered off a
film--to Rose Severance, a man narrow and flat as if he were cut out of
thin grey paper, talking, talking in a voice as dry and rattling as a
flapping windowblind of their "vacation" together and a house with
a little garden where she can sew and he can putter around,--to Ted,
Elinor Piper, the profile pure as if it were painted on water, passing
like water flowing from the earth in springs, in its haughty temperance,
its retired beauty, its murmurous quiet--other faces, some trembling
as if touched with light flames, some calm, some merely grotesque with
longing or too much pleasure--all these pass. A great nearness, fiercer
and more slumbrous than any nearness of body takes their place. It wraps
the two closer and closer, a spider spinning a soft web out of petals,
folding the two with swathes and swathes of its heavy, fragrant silk.

"Oh--mine--isn't anything," says Ted rather unsteadily, after the
moment. "Only looking at firelight and wanting to take the coals in my
hands."

Rose's voice is firmer than his but her mouth is still moved with
content at the thing it has desired being brought nearer.

"I really can't prescribe on as little evidence as that," she says with
music come back to her voice in the stren