During the next few days Edgar hardly left my bedside. My head and eyes were still kept tightly bandaged, so that I could neither see nor speak, nor take solid food. Seeing me in this piteous condition, Edgar, like the good fellow he was, decided that sermons were out of season, and that I must be amused. His humour, however, being of a somewhat slow and cumbrous kind adapted to his size, I took advantage of my enforced silence to let him joke on unheeded, while my own thoughts wandered dreamily away to my life of the past few years, and to the odd, quickly discovered mistake in which it had lately culminated. I was surprised by the persistency with which Helen's placid silliness tormented me, fresh instances of it coming every hour into my mind until I began to ask myself whether the little blue-eyed lady had really been born into the world with a soul at all. And so, no longer suffering bodily pain, I lay day after day, very much absorbed by my own self-questionings, and by strange dreams of a new Helen, who came to me with the fair face and soft eyes of the old, but with bright intelligence in her gaze, whispering with her delicate lips words of love and tenderness. I woke up suddenly one night, still hot with my sleeping fancy that this revised edition of my _fiancee_ had been with me. I had seemed to feel her breath upon my cheek, even to feel the touch of her lips upon my ear, as she told me my illness had taught her how much she loved me. I thought I was answering her in passionate words with a great thrill of joy in my heart, when I woke up and found myself as usual in darkness and silence. 'Edgar!' I called out; 'Edgar!' He answered sleepily from a little way off, 'Yes. Do you want anything?' 'No, thank you.' A pause. 'I say,' I went on a few moments later, 'nobody has been in the room, have they?' 'No, no-o-body,' with a yawn. 'At least, I may have dozed, but I don't think----' 'No, of course not.' But I was horribly wide awake by this time. Some of the bandages round my head having been removed for the first time the evening before, I had liberty of speech again, of which I seemed resolved to make the most. 'I say, Edgar, there's a fire flickering in the grate, isn't there?' 'Yes, why?' 'Well, if I can see that quite well, why on earth do they still keep the bandages over my eyes? I know they were afraid of my going blind. But I haven't; so what's it for?' 'I don't know,' mumbled Edgar, rather blankly. He added hastily, 'I suppose the doctor knows best; you'd better leave them alone.' 'Oh yes.' A long silence, during which Edgar, under the impression that it was part of a sick nurse's duty when the patient showed signs of restlessness, pottered about the room, and at last fell over something. 'I say, Edgar,' I began again, 'isn't my face a good deal battered about on the right side?' I heard him stop, and there was a little clash of glasses. Then he spoke, with some constraint.