"Will not you sit down? It seems monstrous that I should be lying here letting you wait upon yourself. Will you try that one?" pointing to the chair which is figuring at the same moment so prominently in Jim's tormented fancy. "I am afraid you will not find it very comfortable. I have not tried it yet, but it looks as hard as a board." She sits down meekly as he bids her, glad to be no longer obliged to depend upon her shaky limbs, and answers: "Thank you; it is quite comfortable." "Would not it be better if you had a cushion?"--looking all round the room for one. His voice is courteous, tender almost, in its solicitude for her ease. But is she asleep or awake? Can this be the same voice that poured the frenzy of its heartrending adjurations into her ear scarce a month ago? Can this long, cool, white saint--he looks somehow like a young saint in his emaciation and his skull-cap--be the stammering maniac who, when last she saw him, crashed down nigh dead at her feet, slain by three words from her mouth? At the stupefaction engendered by these questions, her own brain seems turning, but she feebly tries to recover herself. "I--I am so glad you are better." "Thank you so much. Yes, it _is_ nice; nice to be "'Not burnt with thirsting, Nor with hot fingers, nor with temples bursting.' Do you remember Keats?" After all, there is something of the original Byng left, and the ghost of his old spouting voice in which he recites the above couplet gives her back a greater measure of composure than could almost anything else. "It is nice, only one would like to be able to jump, not 'the life to come'--ha! ha!--but the convalescence to come. My mother is even more impatient than I am. She has made up her mind that we are to be off in three days, even if I am carried on board on a shutter." She can see now that he is very much embarrassed--that his fluency is but the uneasy cover of some emotion--and the discovery enables her yet further to regain possession of herself. "I should think," she says in her gentle voice, "that you would be very glad to get out of this room, where--where you have suffered so much." "Well, yes; one does grow a little tired of seeing "'The casement slowly grow a glimmering square;' but"--with a rather forced laugh--"at least, I have had cause to be thankful that there is no wall-paper to count the pattern of. I have blessed the white wall for its featureless face." She moves a little in her chair, as if to assure herself that she is really awake. That stupefaction is beginning to numb her again--that hazy feeling that this is not Byng at all, this polite invalid, making such civil conversation for her; this is somebody else.