This was the first time she had ever been in room--with its poverty, its

bareness. She must have cast about it a look of delicate inquiry--as a woman

is apt to do in a singleman's abode; for when she came again, in addition to

pieces of soft old linen for bandages brought fresh cool fragrant

sheets--the work of her own looms; a better pillow with a pillow-case on it

that was delicious to his cheek; for he had his weakness about clean, white

linen. She put a curtain over the pitiless window. He saw a wild rose in a

glass beside his Testament. He discovered moccasin slippers beside his bed.

"And here," she had said just before leaving, with her hand on a pile of

things and with an embarrassed laugh--keeping her face turned away--"here

are some towels."

Under the towels he found two night shirts--new ones.

When she was gone, he lay thinking of her again.

He had gratefully slipped on one of the shirts. He was feeling the new sense

of luxury that is imparted by a bed enriched with snow-white, sweet-smelling

pillows and sheets. The curtain over his window strained into his room a

light shadowy, restful. The flower on his table,--the transforming touch in

his room--her noble brooding tenderness--everything went into his gratitude,

his remembrance of her. But all this--he argued with a sudden taste for fine

discrimination--had not been done out of mere anxiety for his life: it was

not the barren solicitude of a nurse but the deliberate, luxurious regard of

a mother for his comfort: no doubt it represented the ungovernable overflow

of the maternal, long pent-up in her ungratified. And by this route he came

at last to a thought of her that novel for him--the pitying recollection of

her childlessness.

"What a mother she would have been!" he said rebelliously. "The mother of

sons who would have become great through her--and greater through the memory

of her after she was gone."

When she came again, seeing him out of danger and seeing him comfortable,

she seated herself beside his table and opened her work."It isn't good for

you to talk much," she soon said reprovingly, "and I have to work--and to

think."

And so he lay watching her--watching her beautiful fingers which never

seemed to rest in life--watching her quiet brow with its ripple of lustrous

hair forever suggesting to him how her lovely neck and shoulders would be

buried by it if its long light waves were but loosened. To have a woman

sitting by his table with her sewing--it turned his room into something

vaguely dreamed of heretofore: a home. She finished a sock for Major

Falconer and began on one of his shirts. He counted the stitches as they

went into a sleeve. They made him angry. And her face!--over it had come a

look of settled weariness; for perhaps if there is ever a time when a woman

forgets and the inward sorrow steals outward to the surface as an unwatched

shadow along a wall, it is when she sews.




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