a
background for his portraits. She was asked to brush his hair and beard,
and wrap his shoulders in an ivory-white shawl, thick with silk
embroideries, which had been his mother's. In a little green bronze
tripod a black pastille was set burning, which sent up, slow, thin, and
wavering, a gray spiral of perfume.

Keenly as he was waiting, he yet did not know when the ladies arrived.
He opened his eyes, and they were there, shedding around them a
beautiful freshness of health and the world outside. Estelle, in a soft
green velvet edged with silver fur, held toward him an immense bunch of
flowers. Aurora, in a wine-colored cloth bordered with bands of black
fox, tendered a basket heaped with fruit. Both smiled, and had the kind
look of angels.

They sat down beside his bed. They talked with him; all was just as
usual. They asked the old questions pertinent to the case, he made the
old answers, and by an effort kept up for some minutes a drawing-room
conversation with them.

Then Aurora said:

"Hush! You mustn't talk any more!" And when he thought she was going
away, he wondered to see her take off her gloves.

She stood over him; he wondered what she meant to do. She felt of his
forehead with her cool hand. With her palms, which were like her voice,
of a velvet not too soft, she smoothed his forehead and temples; she
stroked them over and over in a way that seemed to draw the ache out of
his brain. Her fingers moved soothingly, magnetically, all around his
eye-sockets, pressing down the eyelids and comforting them.

At first he resisted. Perversely he frowned, as if the thing increased
his pain, annoyed him beyond words. He all but cried out to the
well-meaning hands to stop.

"Doesn't it feel good?" asked Aurora, anxiously.

He relaxed. Without opening his eyes, he nodded to thank her, and as he
yielded himself up to the hands it seemed to him that those passes drew
his spirit after them quite out of his body.

* * * * *

"I don't think I'll go up with you," Estelle said unexpectedly when on
the next day they stopped before the narrow yellow door in Borgo Pinti.
"I'll wait here in the carriage. I'm nervous myself to-day. Give my best
regards to Gerald. I hope you'll find him better."

Aurora did not take time to examine into the possible reasons for her
friend's choice. She climbed the long stairs sturdily, managing her
breath so that she did not have to stop and