chessmen that Carrie sent me from China.
They are beautifully carved. And now it's time for me to go."

She rose and patted his hand, telling him he must not be foolish
about seeing people. "I didn't know you were so vain. Bandages
are as becoming to you as they are to anybody. Shall I pull the
dark blind again for you?"

"Yes, please. There won't be anything to look at now."

"Why, Claude, you are getting to be quite a ladies' man!"

Something in the way Enid said this made him wince a little. He
felt his burning face grow a shade warmer. Even after she went
downstairs he kept wishing she had not said that.

His mother came to give him his medicine. She stood beside him
while he swallowed it. "Enid Royce is a real sensible girl--" she
said as she took the glass. Her upward inflection expressed not
conviction but bewilderment.

Enid came every afternoon, and Claude looked forward to her
visits restlessly; they were the only pleasant things that
happened to him, and made him forget the humiliation of his
poisoned and disfigured face. He was disgusting to himself; when
he touched the welts on his forehead and under his hair, he felt
unclean and abject. At night, when his fever ran high, and the
pain began to tighten in his head and neck, it wrought him to a
distressing pitch of excitement. He fought with it as one bulldog
fights with another. His mind prowled about among dark legends of
torture,--everything he had ever read about the Inquisition, the
rack and the wheel.

When Enid entered his room, cool and fresh in her pretty summer
clothes, his mind leaped to meet her. He could not talk much, but
he lay looking at her and breathing in a sweet contentment. After
awhile he was well enough to sit up half-dressed in a steamer
chair and play chess with her.

One afternoon they were by the west window in the sitting-room
with the chess board between them, and Claude had to admit that
he was beaten again.

"It must be dull for you, playing with me," he murmured, brushing
the beads of sweat from his forehead. His face was clean now, so
white that even his freckles had disappeared, and his hands were
the soft, languid hands of a sick man.

"You will play better when you are stronger and can fix your mind
on it," Enid assured him. She was puzzled because Claude, who had
a good head for some things, had none at all for chess, and it
was clear that he would never play well.

"Yes," he sighed, dropping back into his