did not wish her friend to "become interested."

"You're too different," Estelle had said. "You 're like a fish and a bird. I won't say I don't like him. He's nice in a way, but it's not our way, Nell. You 'd be miserable with him, first or last."

"My dear," Aurora had replied, "if you knew the sort of things we talk about when you 're not there you would n't worry. If you can see Gerald Fane in the part of my beau you must be cracked. And if you think I 'm soft on him, you 're only a little bit less cracked."

But not wishing to rouse any further uneasiness in her friend, she no more after that spoke frankly of Gerald whenever he came into her mind. And when she declined Estelle's invitation to go with her to Mlle. Durand's, where she would hear the pupils of the latter recite Corneille and Racine, she did not tell her what she had planned to do instead, fully intending, however, to reveal it later.

GERALD meanwhile did not flatter himself imagining Aurora unhappy because he stayed away longer than had lately been quite usual. Time dragged with him, but the calendar told him that just so many days, no more, had passed. He pictured her going her cheerful gait, occasionally saying, perhaps, "I wonder what has become of Stickly-prickly?"

He had not gone to the mid-Lent entertainment as a matter of course. Aurora had shown small knowledge of him. when she thought he would consent to see her disport herself before the public as a negress. On the day after, when he learned that she had been the star of the evening as a negro, his frenzied disgust itself warned him of the injustice, the impropriety, of exhibiting it to her. He chose to remain away until it should have sufficiently worn down to be governable. By that time the poor man had developed an illness, that cold of which for some weeks he had been carrying around in his bones the premonition.

With reddened eyelids and thickened nose, a sore throat and a cough, he felt

himself no fit object for a lady's sight. He stayed in to take care of himself.

Giovanna knew what to do for her signorino when he was raffreddato. She built a little fire in the studio; she brought his light meals to him in his arm-chair before it. She administered remedies. All day Gerald sat by the fire and read, sometimes dozed and dreamed, and read again. And days passed, while his cold held on.

He thought of writing Aurora to tell her. But if he told her, she would at once come to see him; of so much one could be sure. And he did not want her to come. The eccentric fellow did not want her to come precisely because he wanted her to come so much.

"This is the way it begins," he said to himself, with horror, when he became fully aware that his nerves, now that he could not go to find Aurora when he chose, were suggesting to him all the time that the presence of Aurora was needed to quiet that sense of want, of maladjustment to conditions, haunting him like the desire for sleep.

Every time the door-bell rang-it was not often, certainly-his attention was taken from his book, and he listened. And so, on Mlle. Durand's French afternoon, Gerald, having heard the bell, was listening, but with his face to the fire and his back to the door. When Giovanna knocked, "Forward!" he said, without turning. The door opened.

"C'è quella signora" ["There is that lady"], dubiously announced Giovanna. Gerald turned, and beheld that lady filling the doorway.

Then it was as if a bright trumpet-blast of reality, breaking upon a bad dream, dispelled it; or as if a fresh wind, blowing over stagnant water, swept away the cloud of noxious gnats. All he had latterly been thinking and feeling seemed to Gerald insane, sickly, the instant he beheld Aurora's comradely smile. He was ashamed; he found himself on the verge of stupid, unexplainable tears.

"Well!" said Aurora.

At the sound they were placed back on the exact footing of their last meeting,

before thinking and conjecturing about each other in absence had built up between them barriers of illusion.

"Well!" he said, but less pleasantly, because he was mortified by the awareness of himself as an uninviting sight, with his old dressing-gown, neglected beard, and the unpicturesque manifestations of a cold.

But Aurora's face was reassuring; she did not confuse him with the accidents of his dressing-gown and beard and cold. Aurora's face beamed, so much was she rejoicing in her own excellent sense, which had told her that one look at each other would do a thousand times more to make things right between them than innumerable letters could have done.

"I did n't know what to think," she said, "so I came to find out. First I'd think you were mad at me, then I'd think you had gone away and written me, and the letter had n't reached me, Gaetano had lost it on the road. Then I'd think you might be sick, and there was nobody to let your friends know. I don't know what I did n't think of. What made you not send me word?"

"I did not know you would be uneasy. I did not rightly measure, it seems, the depth of your kindness. I should certainly have written to you before long in case I had continued unable to go to see you."

"How long have you been sick?"

"I am not sick, dearest lady; I only have a cold. In order to make it go away more quickly I have to remain in the house. But how good, how very good, of you to come! Sit down, please do, and warm yourself. I will ring for Giovanna, and she will make us some tea."

Aurora, smiling all the time with the pleasure she felt in not finding him angry or estranged or in any way altered toward her, took the arm-chair from which he had just risen, while he drew a lighter chair to the other side of the chimneyplace. His fires were not like hers. Two half-burned sticks and a form of turf smoldered sparingly on a mound of hot ashes; he eagerly cast on a fagot, and added wood with, for once, an extrava

gant hand. Then, looking over at her, he smiled, too.

"Now tell me all about yourself," she commanded. "I want to know what you 're doing for this cold of yours."

"Please let us not talk about my cold," he at once refused. "Let us talk about something agreeable. Tell me the news. I have not seen any one for days."

"You say you have n't seen any one for days," she said. "Now the Fosses, for instance, who are your best friends, don't you let them know when you 're shut in?"

"You have no conception, evidently, of my bearishness, dear friend. They have. They never wonder when they do not see me or hear from me for weeks."

They went on talking, without much thought of what they said. It was immaterial, really, what they said, or even whether they listened to each other, while they had in common the comfort of sitting together in front of the fire after a long separation filled with doubts and dismays. She told him about the Convalescents' Home, the sum they had raised for it. No word, prudently, was spoken by either of her share in raising it.

Aurora's attention became closer when Gerald related his interviews with De Brézé and Costanzi, both of whom he had succeeded in convincing that Antonia had had nothing to do with intriguing them at the veglione.

His attention, on the other hand, was complete when she told him how she had dealt with Ceccherelli; she was considerate enough to-day to make the effort to pronounce the gentleman's cognomen.

"I was savage at him, you remember," she said. "I was going to take his head off. Then when it came to it, and I had told him what I thought of him and the disgraceful scrape he had got me into, do you know, he cried, he felt so. He just cried on his knees, and did n't try to get rid of any of the blame. All he wanted was that I should forgive him. And what could I do? As long, particularly, as I knew that a good deal of the fault was my own. So now he comes to the house with a look as if he 'd just been

baptized. And he tells me only stories fit, he says, for a convent."

Both of them were pleasantly aware of a tray placed on the table near them, as if descended from heaven, laden with teapot, bread and butter, jam. Neither of them really saw Giovanna, who brought it in, or was struck by the stern expression of her face.

Aurora turned her attention to the tray. Gerald wished to serve her, and she first noticed his weakness when she saw the tea-pot tremble slightly in his hand. She went on chattering, but she was observing him.

"Is your carriage waiting before the door?" he suddenly asked, after a space during which she had suspected that he was not attending to what she said. Aurora's monogram, daintily executed, adorned the door-panels of her carriage.

"Yes," she answered. "Why?"

As if he had not heard, he changed the subject. After a while he asked, again irrelevantly:

"How was it that Miss Madison did not come with you this afternoon?"

"She was going to a different tea-party." Supposing that his question was a way of politely desiring news of Miss Madison, she went on to talk of her. "She'll be sorry to hear you 're sick. Don't say that again, Gerald," she silenced him, letting her anxiety at last plainly appear. "Don't tell me you are n't sick, for I know better. Your cough is so tight it sounds as if it tore your lungs. Give me your hand. It 's as hot, dear boy, and as dry! Wait, let me feel your pulse."

He laughed at her light-headedly while with serious concentration she counted the beats in his wrist.

"I'm going to stop at Dr. Gage's on my way home," she said, letting go his hand, and not heeding what he said. "And I'm going to tell him to come and see you."

"Please do not! If I need a doctor, there is my own, an Italian, the same for years."

"An Italian? Do you think they 're as good?"

"Better for my own case."

"Now, if I have any influence with you, Gerald, if you love me one little bit, you'll promise to go right to bed, and you'll give me your doctor's address, so that on my way home I can leave word for him to come."

"You shall not take that trouble. I can send Gaetano."

"You promise me you 'll do it, then?" "I seem to have been left no choice, dear lady."

"That 's real sweet of you. You'll go to bed the minute I 've gone?"

"Yes. But don't go quite yet!"

"With that temperature, I don't see how you can care who stays or who goes, or anything in the world but to lay your head down on a pillow. I won't stay any longer now. Go to bed like a good boy. To-morrow I'll run in and see how you 're getting along."

His last word was, after a moment of seeming embarrassment:

"I hope Miss Madison will be able to come with you next time."

"Yes, yes," said Aurora, lightly, taking it for a mere amiable message with which he was charging her for Estelle.

FEVER no doubt colored all Gerald's dreams that night, and was in part responsible next day for his thoughts, as he passed from languor to restlessness, and from impatience back to the peace of the certain knowledge that before evening he should have visitors-fair visitors.

When it seemed to him nearly time for them, he ordered Giovanna to make the room of a beautiful and perfect neatness, hiding all the medicine bottles and humble signs that one is mortal. She was directed to lay across his white counterpane that square of brocade which often formed 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 pastil 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 must n'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 eyesockets, 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.

"Does n'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 today. 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 rest on the way.

She followed the stern Giovanna, unsubdued by the latter's hard and jealous looks, to the door of her master's chamber. She went toward the bed, smiling at the sick man over an armful of white lilacs.

He half rose in his bed and quickly, disconnectedly, impetuously said:

"My dear friend, this is most good of you. I'm sure I thank you very much. I'm very, very much better, as you can see. I shall be out again in a day or two." He was visibly trembling; his eyes flared with excitement. "That being the case, my dear lady, I earnestly beg you will not trouble to come like this every day." He stopped to to choke and cough, then wrenched himself free from strangulation. "Aurora,"-he changed his key and tune, -"do let me be ill in peace! Here I am on my back, with a loosened grip on everything, and it's taking an unfair advantage to invade my privacy as you do. Take away those lilacs with you, won't you, please? We have n't any more vases to put them in; they 'd have to be stuck in a bedroom water-jug. Giovanna won't let me have flowers in my room, anyhow; she says they are bad for me. Don't be offended! I know you mean nothing but to be kind, but the thing you are doing is devilish. What do you think I am made of? I don't want you to be offended, but I have got to say what I can to keep you from coming to this house and troubling me in my illness. I have got to say it plainly and fully because you, Aurora. never understand anything that is not said to you in so many words. I might try and try my best to convey the same idea to you in a gentle and gentlemanly way, and not a scrap of good would be done. I've got to talk like a beast. I wish to be alone. Is that clear? I've just struggled and waded my way out of one quagmire; I do not wish to enter another. Is that plain? I wish to feel free to be ill as much and