"That is always the way. No one thinks of _me_," thought Colonel Tempest. And the Round Pond and the growing crowd, and the child nearest him with its convulsed face, all turned slowly before his eyes, slid up, and disappeared. CHAPTER V. "Vous avez bien froid, la belle; Comment vous appelez-vous? Les amours et les yeux doux De nos cercueils sont les clous. Je suis la morte, dit-elle. Cueillez la branche de houx." VICTOR HUGO. As John lay impatiently patient upon his bed in the round oak-panelled room at Overleigh during the weeks that followed his accident, his thoughts by day, and by night, varied no more than the notes of a chaffinch in the trees outside. "Oh, let the solid earth Not fail beneath my feet, Before I too have found What some have found so sweet!" That was the one constant refrain. The solid earth had nearly failed beneath his feet, nearly--nearly. If the world might but cohere together and not fly off into space; if body and soul might but hold together till he had seen Di once more, till he knew for certain from her own lips that she loved him! Unloved by any woman until now, wistfully ignorant of woman's tenderness, even of its first alphabet learned at a mother's knee, unread in all its later language,--in these days of convalescence a passionate craving was upon him to drink deep of that untasted cup which "some have found so sweet." He had Mitty, and Mitty at least was radiantly happy during these weeks, with John fast in bed, and in a condition to dispense with other nursing than hers. She sat with him by the hour together, mending his socks and shirts, for she would not suffer any one to touch his clothes except herself, and discoursing to him about Di--a subject which she soon perceived never failed to interest him. "Miss Dinah," Mitty would say for the twentieth time, but without wearying her audience--"now, there's a fine upstanding lady for my lamb." "Lady Alice Fane is very pretty, too," John would remark, with the happy knack of self-concealment peculiar to the ostrich and the sterner sex. "Hoots!" Mitty replied. "She's nothing beside Miss Dinah. If you have Lady Fane with her silly ways, and so snappy to her maid, you'll repent every hair of your head. You take Miss Dinah, my dear, as is only waiting to be asked. She wants you, my precious," Mitty never failed to add. "I tell you it's as plain as the nose on your face" (a simile the force of which could not fail to strike him). "It's not that Lord Hemstitch, for all his pretty looks. It's _you_."