t of the night, she
arranged herself in her easy-chair for a good sleep, too.

* * * * *

On the next day she divined from his half troubled look at her, and the
shy modesty of his manner, that he was wondering whether he had actually
babbled last night, or in a mild delirium dreamed the whole thing. Not
from her might he find out. Her easy, matter-of-fact way made any such
passage seem at least unlikely.

Having slept during the night she did not retire to rest during the day,
but let Giovanna go about her long neglected affairs and in her place
looked after Gerald, who had waked from his deep sleep immensely
refreshed. He would not need a constant watcher beside him after this,
during night or day.

"What shall I do to amuse you?" she asked him, to make an interruption
after she had felt him watching her through half closed lids for some
time. "Don't you want me to read to you?"

"I think not, Aurora. Thank you just as much."

"Well, then, how shall I entertain you? Do you want me to be a gold-fish
for you?"

"How do you 'be a gold-fish,' Aurora?"

"Look!" But the instant she changed her face into a gold-fish's and
waggled up through imaginary water, opening and shutting her mouth like
a rubber valve, he hid his eyes, crying sharply, "Please stop! I don't
want to see it."

The gold-fish personality was dropped.

"Very well, then," she said, with unimpaired serenity, "shall I do a
squirrel gnawing a nut? Every family its own circus."

"If you do it, I will not look. How can you endure, lovely as you are,
to make yourself ugly--grotesque?"

"Aren't you rather hard to suit to-day, mister? Shall I be a hen, then,
scratching for her chicks? That's mild."

"No, no, no. Yes. No. I don't know about the hen. Let me have a sample."

He watched her, critically and provisionally, while with comfortable,
motherly, half-suppressed chest-sounds, and a round eye cocked for finds
among the dirt, remarkably altogether the appearance of a pensive white
hen, she made believe to scratch up the earth with her feet. A rather
sympathetic performance, he allowed, her imitation of the hen, calling
up before one the vision of a farmyard, a brood of downy yellow chicks,
a duckpond, sunshine, green things.

He let her do it as long as she would, or rather until to vary the thing
she increased the comic beyond the line he fixed. When midday found him
grudgingly laughing at her cackling,