as the days went by, peacefully and seemingly uneventfully, the
time she spent with Francis became more and more the pivot on which
Philippa's whole mind and thought turned. Day by day, almost hour by
hour, he appeared to gain visibly in vigour. The cheerfulness and high
spirits which had characterised him in an unusual degree before his
accident, returned to him; and she marvelled increasingly at the almost
boyish gaiety which he evinced at times. There were moments when she
had perforce to remind herself of the long years of loneliness and
deprivation through which he had passed. They seemed to have left no
mark on him. And yet she could not think they were forgotten, for
once--it was at her second visit to him--he spoke at some length of his
illness. Not, however, with any bitterness or annoyance, but merely as
one might mention a curious experience through which one had lived, and
for which one was little or none the worse.

"It is all so muddled to me. Sometimes it seems as if I had waited
years for the sight of your face, and then again it would seem only the
day before that I had seen you. Sometimes I saw you so clearly that I
thought you were in the room, only I never could get you to speak to
me. And I never could touch you. The moment I thought you were coming
nearer you went away altogether. That was what bothered me. I suppose
it was imagination or some kind of delirium, but it was rather
dreadful, for when I couldn't see you everything was swallowed up in a
horrible darkness. It was only when you came that there was daylight
at all, the rest was a dreadful night."

"Don't talk of it," she had begged him, "it is over now." And seeing
that the subject distressed her he had not spoken of it again.

Philippa found no difficulty in amusing him, or distracting his
attention from anything which her intuition warned her might lead to
dangerous questioning. She sang to him, and read to him, choosing
lighter stories from the magazines, and preferably those in which the
plot was laid in other countries or in previous centuries. He showed
no signs of bewilderment when such events as the Indian Mutiny or the
French Revolution were mentioned, and the girl could not be sure
whether he listened without comprehending, for the mere pleasure of
hearing her voice and knowing her companionship, or whether some
feeling of half-shamed reticence prevented his acknowledging that he
had never heard of these things