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The lieutenant brought his heels together, and bent low. “I beg her pardon with all my heart. I am very, very sorry. I will do anything I can. I would like to stop that. May I bring my mother to call on Miss Gerald?”

He offered his hand, and Lanfear wrung it hard, a lump of gratitude in his throat choking any particular utterance, while a fine shame for his late hostile intention covered him.

When the lieutenant came, with all possible circumstance, bringing the countess, his mother, Mr. Gerald overwhelmed them with hospitality of every form. The Italian lady responded effusively, and more sincerely cooed and murmured her compassionate interest in his daughter. Then all parted the best of friends; but when it was over, Miss Gerald did not know what it had been about. She had not remembered the lieutenant or her father’s vexation, or any phase of the incident which was now closed. Nothing remained of it but the lieutenant’s right, which he gravely exercised, of saluting them respectfully whenever he met them.

VII

Earlier, Lanfear had never allowed himself to be far out of call from Miss Gerald’s father, especially during the daytime slumbers into which she fell, and from which they both always dreaded her awakening. But as the days went on and the event continued the same he allowed himself greater range. Formerly the three went their walks or drives together, but now he sometimes went alone. In these absences he found relief from the stress of his constant vigilance; he was able to cast off the bond which enslaves the physician to his patient, and which he must ignore at times for mere self-preservation’s sake; but there was always a lurking anxiety, which, though he refused to let it define itself to him, shortened the time and space he tried to put between them.

One afternoon in April, when he left her sleeping, he was aware of somewhat recklessly placing himself out of reach in a lonely excursion to a village demolished by the earthquake of 1887, and abandoned himself, in the impressions and incidents of his visit to the ruin, to a luxury of impersonal melancholy which the physician cannot often allow himself. At last, his care found him, and drove him home full of a sharper fear than he had yet felt since the first days. But Mr. Gerald was tranquilly smoking under a palm in the hotel garden, and met him with an easy smile. “She woke once, and said she had had such a pleasant dream. Now she’s off again. Do you think we’d better wake her for dinner? I suppose she’s getting up her strength in this way. Her sleeping so much is a good symptom, isn’t it?”

Lanfear smiled forlornly; neither of them, in view of the possible eventualities, could have said what result they wished the symptoms to favor. But he said: “Decidedly I wouldn’t wake her”; and he spent a night of restless sleep penetrated by a nervous expectation which the morning, when it came, rather mockingly defeated.

Miss Gerald appeared promptly at breakfast in their pavilion, with a fresher and gayer look than usual, and to her father’s “Well, Nannie, you have had a nap, this time,” she answered, smiling:

“Have I? It isn’t afternoon, is it?”

“No, it’s morning. You’ve napped it all night.”

She said: “I can’t tell whether I’ve been asleep or not, sometimes; but now I know I have been; and I feel so rested. Where are we going to-day?”

She turned to Lanfear while her father answered: “I guess the doctor won’t want to go very far, to-day, after his expedition yesterday afternoon.”

“Ah,” she said, “I knew you had been somewhere! Was it very far? Are you too tired?”

“It was rather far, but I’m not tired. I shouldn’t advise Possana, though.”

“Possana?” she repeated. “What is Possana?”

He told her, and then at a jealous look in her eyes he added an account of his excursion. He heightened, if anything, its difficulties, in making light of them as no difficulties for him, and at the end she said, gently: “Shall we go this morning?”