It seems to be a fact that love, like the camel, can live on its own resources for a length of time that amazes the less fantastic and incalculable rest of creation; but it is equally certain and a great deal more comprehensible that months of strain, followed by a spell of hot weather, salad and strawberries, nervous excitement, sleepless nights and a climax of elemental emotion, have sooner or later to be paid for; that, soothing as it may be to the soul to lie for three hours in a damp ditch without changing afterwards, it is distinctly bad for the body; and finally, that only a lover or a camel (there is certainly a likeness between them in more ways than one) could be surprised if at last even their strength goes from them, and they give their relations or their driver a deal of unnecessary trouble. Laura, developing, for no reason that Aunt Adela could conceive, a feverish cold, dragged about the house for a week, refusing to go beyond the garden, saying how much better she would be in a day or two, and then collapsed. Once in bed she found herself suddenly too weak and ill to struggle with the kindly, overbearing Samsons who kept her there, and by the end of the day the very knowledge of them had passed, swamped, with the memory of the past and the fear of the future, in the present mercy of bodily pain. From that timeless interval she woke one day to the realization of a darkened room and a clock ticking, and a calendar on the wall with ‘twenty-five’ in staring, black figures and July above it, and below a verse, and below that again a table with bottles and a cup. She recognized them at once—bottles and a cup and a table and a calendar, a calendar and a table——Why had somebody said something just now about Laura being delirious?... Poor Laura!... saying cruel things like that about poor Laura.... She was sorry for that poor girl.... And here she began to laugh aloud, weakly, because she was Laura herself, lying on her own bed, able to move and speak, though the bedclothes were a weight unbearable and there was a weight like bedclothes on her mind. She looked up at an aunt appearing miraculously out of space. “I’m Laura!” she told her. “Of course you are. Now be a good girl and go to sleep.” “Poor Laura,” she said—and obeyed.