Her common ordinary shoulder. What did he see in her? Taking for granted that he saw something, Aurora attributed this unknown quality in herself to God, and thanked Him. She tightened her clasp about Gerald, the better to feel him there. The power of the sleeping-potion had overtaken him completely. Thoughts that moistened her eyes resulted from feeling her arms full of the breathing warmth of a beloved form. Those defrauded maternal arms! That other, who would have been five years old at this time, and would have been called little Dan, after Dan, her big father, how she would have nursed him through his childish ailments, how she would have held him and rocked him! No, she would never stop yearning over him. One must suppose that God knows best. Gerald's breathing was deep and quiet. When sure that it could be done without waking him, she let him gently down on to the pillow. She stood beside the bed for a few minutes, in her soft garment of cashmere and swansdown which made no more sound when she moved than did her velvet shoes; she watched him sleep with emotions of gratitude beyond possibility of expression to any one but that old intimate, God. He was getting well so surely and fast. He would shortly be as well as ever. Confident that he would want nothing more for the rest of the night, she arranged herself in her easy-chair for a good sleep, too. * * * * * On the next day she divined from his half troubled look at her, and the shy modesty of his manner, that he was wondering whether he had actually babbled last night, or in a mild delirium dreamed the whole thing. Not from her might he find out. Her easy, matter-of-fact way made any such passage seem at least unlikely. Having slept during the night she did not retire to rest during the day, but let Giovanna go about her long neglected affairs and in her place looked after Gerald, who had waked from his deep sleep immensely refreshed. He would not need a constant watcher beside him after this, during night or day. "What shall I do to amuse you?" she asked him, to make an interruption after she had felt him watching her through half closed lids for some time. "Don't you want me to read to you?" "I think not, Aurora. Thank you just as much." "Well, then, how shall I entertain you? Do you want me to be a gold-fish for you?" "How do you 'be a gold-fish,' Aurora?" "Look!" But the instant she changed her face into a gold-fish's and waggled up through imaginary water, opening and shutting her mouth like a rubber valve, he hid his eyes, crying sharply, "Please stop! I don't want to see it." The gold-fish personality was dropped. "Very well, then," she said, with unimpaired serenity, "shall I do a squirrel gnawing a nut? Every family its own circus." "If you do it, I will not look. How can you endure, lovely as you are, to make yourself ugly--grotesque?"