"Is that a poultice on your chest? I guess it's what you need. 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 embarra.s.sment:

"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 pa.s.sed 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 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 pa.s.ses 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 st.u.r.dily, 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 choke and cough, then wrenching 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 haven'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 sc.r.a.p 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 as long as I choose. It concerns n.o.body. It concerns n.o.body if I die. It would be an excellent thing, saving me the trouble later of blowing out my brains.... My G.o.d, Aurora, have you understood?"

he almost shouted.

"Yes," said Aurora in a voice that sounded pale, even as her face looked pale. "I have understood, and I won't come again. Just one thing, Gerald. Put your arms under the bed clothes and keep them there."

"Whether he's better or worse I truly couldn't tell you," Aurora said in answer to Estelle's first question. After a moment she added, "I can't make him out."

Estelle saw that she was deeply troubled, and, herself troubled at the sight, did not press her for explanations.

During the drive home Aurora made only one other remark. It was delivered with a certain emphasis.

"_One_ thing I know: I sha'n't go _there_ again in a hurry!"

Her lilacs, after wondering a moment what to do with them, she had quietly deposited outside Gerald's entrance-door.

It was unimaginable, of course, that the childhood's friend should so disregard the rules of the game as to leave her old playmate's curiosity long unsatisfied. Estelle accordingly learned before evening that Gerald had been guilty of an attack of nerves, in the course of which he had said something which Aurora did not like. What this was Aurora would not tell, saying it seemed unfair to repeat things Gerald had spoken while he was not himself and which he perhaps did not mean. From which Estelle judged that Aurora had already softened since she returned to the carriage looking as grim as she was grieved.

That Aurora had something on her mind no observant person could fail to see, and Estelle was not unprepared to hear her say as she did on the third morning at breakfast, after fidgeting a moment with a pinch of bread:

"I'm so uneasy I don't know what to do. That boy is much sicker than he knows," she went on to justify her disquietude, "and he's in a bad mood for getting well. I don't believe Italian doctors know much, anyhow.

I've heard that they still put leeches on you. All he has to take care of him, day and night, is that old servant-woman What's-her-name, who, he told me himself, doctors him with herb-tea. I'm so uneasy! The sort of cold he has, I tell you, can turn any minute into something you don't want. He's all run down and a bad subject for pneumonia. I'm thinking I shall have to just go to the door and find out how he is."

"You could send a servant to inquire," suggested Estelle.

Aurora appeared to reflect; she might have been trying to find a reason for not taking the hint, but she said, "No; I should feel better satisfied to go myself."

At the last moment, when they were ready to start, Estelle found Busteretto's nose hot, and decided not to go. She stayed at home and called a doctor. For some days the pet had not seemed to her in quite his usual form.

Aurora, climbing Gerald's stairs this time, felt very uncertain and rather small. The street door, when she had pulled the bell-handle, had unlatched with a click, but no voice had called down, and when she reached the top landing the door in front of her stood forbiddingly closed. She waited for some minutes, wondering whether she were doing right. Suppose Gerald were enough better to be up again and, Giovanna being out, should himself come to open the door. How would she feel, caught slinking back, after she had been requested loudly and roundly to stay away?

Well, set aside how she felt, the object of her coming would have been reached, wouldn't it? She would know that he was better. She rang and listened.

Certain, as soon as she heard them, whose footsteps were on the other side of the door, she held in readiness her Italian. She counted on understanding Giovanna's answer to her question, for she had, as she boasted, "quite a vocabulary." But much more than to this she trusted to the talent which Italians have for making their meaning clear through pantomime and facial expression.

As soon, in fact, as Giovanna opened the door, and before the woman had said a word in reply to "_Come sta Signor Fane?_" Aurora had understood.

Giovanna's eyes, stained with recent weeping, looked up at the visitor without severity or aversion, seeking for sympathy; the unintelligible account she gave of her master's condition was broken up with sighs.