He went directly toward her; and she, her knees scarcely supporting her, mounted the last rung of the ladder and seated herself sidewise on the top of the wall, looking down at him, leaning on one arm.

“It is nice to see you out,” she said, as he came to the foot of the sunny wall....  “Do you really feel as thin as you look?...  I had a letter from your aunt to-day asking an outsider’s opinion of your condition, and now I’ll be able to give it....  You do look pathetically thin—­but I shan’t tell her that....  If you are tired standing up you may come into my garden where there are some very agreeable benches....  I would like to have you come if you care to.”

She herself scarcely knew what she was saying; smile, voice, animation were forced; the havoc of his illness stared at her from his sharp cheek-bones, thin, bloodless hands, eyes still slow in turning, dull, heavy-lidded.

“I thought perhaps you would come to call,” he said listlessly.

She flushed.

“You did come, once?”

“Yes.”

“You did not come again while I was conscious, did you?”

“No.”

He passed his thin hand across eyes and forehead.

She folded her arms under her breast and hung far over the shadow-dappled wall half-screened in young vine-leaves.  Over her pink sun-bonnet and shoulders the hot spring sunshine fell; her face was in shadow; his, under the full glare of the unclouded sky, every ravage starkly revealed.  And she could not turn her fascinated gaze or crush out the swelling tenderness that closed her throat to speech and set her eyes glimmering.

The lids closed, slowly; she leaned there without a word, living through in the space of a dozen pulse-beats, the agony and sweetness of the past; then laid her flushed cheek on her arms and opened her eyes, looking at him in silence.

But he dared not sustain her gaze and took refuge from it in a forced gaiety, comparing his reappearance to the return of Ulysses, where Dame Art, that respectable old Haus-Frau, awaited him in a rocking-chair, chastely preoccupied with her tatting, while rival architects squatted anxiously around her, urging their claims to a dead man’s shoes.

She strove to smile at him and to speak coolly:  “Will you come in?  I have finished the vines and presently I’m going to dig.  Wait a moment”—­looking behind her and searching with one tentative foot for the ladder—­“I will have to let you in—­”

A moment later she met him at the grille and flung it wide, holding out her hand in welcome with a careless frankness not quite natural—­nor was the nervously vigorous handshake, nor the laughter, light as a breeze, leaving her breathing fast and unevenly with the hue of excitement deepening on lip and cheek.

So, the handshaking safely over, and chatting together in a tone louder and more animated than usual, they walked down the moist gravel path together—­the extreme width of the path apart.