"I wanted _not_ to come!" he answered, with normal spirit. "But you kept saying Jump in. When a lady has said Jump in three times it acts like a spell, a man has got to jump." "But when it came to the hot bread and syrup, brother, you know you were glad to be there. You kept your superior look, but you ate all I buttered for you. It did me good to see you." "Yes," he grew dreamy again, "it took me back. It took me back to so many things I had nearly forgotten. And when at the end of the evening I was leaving, do you remember, Aurora, wrapping in paper some pieces of maple-sugar and forcing me to take them home in my pocket? I felt absurdly like a little boy and again you seemed like big America; something exhaled from you that made me think of slanting silver-gray roofs and the New England spring of appleblossoms and warbling robins; yes, and of October foliage intolerably bright, and Fourth of July celebrations. Not things I dote on, exactly, but things I was born to, and restful to me after my years of chasing what is not to be caught, wanting what is not to be had, seeking all the time to adjust myself, to adjust myself, to the harshness of life, the treachery, the unaccountability, the relentlessness--restful as this heavenly shoulder, on which I have wished how many hundred times to lay my head like this and not move again, or speak again, or have anything ever change. Aurora, don't say a word, dear. Particularly, kindest Aurora, don't make any of your little jokes. Keep perfectly still, like a good darling, and let me forget everything except where my head is, and be perfectly happy." As seriously as if a god had commanded it, Aurora preserved the silence and immobility requested of her, only making her shoulder as much wider and softer and more comforting as she could by wanting it to be so. When by and by she felt him slip a little as he began to lose himself in sleep, she clasped her hands around him supportingly and held him in place. A single candle burned in the room, with a book to shade it. Aurora's eyes, fixed and starry, rested upon the little flame where it was reflected in a mirror on the wall opposite, but she did not see it at all, so absorbed was she in her thoughts. In her feelings, too. In the wonder of the hour. This remarkable Gerald, with his head packed full of knowledge, with his speech that charmed you as whistling does an adder, with his capacity to paint pictures that the rest could not even understand, and then his rarity, the sweetness of his manners, the fascination of all that unknown in him which came, she had concluded, from his foreign bringing-up--he had wanted ever since he first saw her just to lay his head on her shoulder and rest....