But Medway had depth on depth of _sang-froid_. "You look like her and you don't look like her," he murmured. "You may be like her within, but you can't be all like her. Blessings and cursings are all mixed in this life. You must be a little bit like me--Gipsy!" "It is time," said Hagar, "for an egg beaten up in wine." She gave it to him, standing, grave-eyed, beside the bed. "I do not think you should talk. Shut your eyes and go to sleep." "Can you read aloud?" "Yes, but--" "Can you sing?" "Not to amount to anything. But I can sing to you very low until you go to sleep, if that's what you mean--" "All right. Sing!" She moved from the shaft of light, and began to croon rather than to sing, softly and dreamily, bits of old songs and ballads. In ten minutes he was asleep, and in ten more the nurse returned. The next afternoon Thomson brought her a message. "Mr. Ashendyne would like you to sit with him awhile, Miss." She went, and took her chair by the window, the nurse leaving the room. Medway lay dozing, his eyes half-closed. After a while he woke fully and asked who was there. "It is Hagar, father." "Sit where you were yesterday." She obeyed, taking again her place in the slant light. It made a gold crown for her dusky hair, slid to the hollow of her firm young throat, brought forward her slender shoulders, draped in white, and bathed her long hands, folded in her lap. Medway lay and looked at her, coolly, as long as he pleased. "You are not at all what is called beautiful. We'll dismiss that from mind. But the people who give us our terms are mostly idiots anyhow! Beauty in the eye of the beholder--but what bats are the beholders! No, you haven't beauty, as they say, but there's something left.... I like the way you sit there, Gipsy." "I am glad that you are pleased, father." "I couldn't deduce you from your letters." Her eyes met his. "I did not choose that you should." Again she felt a quiver of pain for what she had said. She was torn between a veritable anger which now and again rose perilously near the surface and a profound pity for his broken body, and for what he would feel when he knew. Her dream of the early winter haunted her. She saw him leaving that white steamer, coming lightly and jauntily down from it to the shore, robust, with a colour in his cheeks and his white hat like a helmet. She heard again Roger Michael speaking. "We met him at Carcassonne, and afterwards at Aigues-Mortes. He was sketching most wonderfully." She saw him, moving lightly, from stone to stone in old half-ruined cities. The dandelion day and the blossoming orchard came back to her; she felt again beneath her his half-dancing motion as he carried her under the boughs where the bees were humming. Her pity, her comprehension, put the anger down. Medway was watching her curiously. "You have a most expressive face," he said. "I do not remember you well as a child. How old were you the last time we met?"