She repeats “as a woman’s,” like a parrot, with the bitter thought that even this generously meant encomium takes the feminine shape that all praise of Rupert must do. No one can deny that the bridegroom she has chosen can hold his own as a judge of lace, mender of china, and shaker of pillows, with any expert in either of these three branches of accomplishment in Europe. The cloud on her brow must be a visible one, for the sick man’s next remark has a note of doubt and trouble in it. “I have often heard Bill talk of him. Though they were not alike in externals, nor, I imagine, in tastes, they meant a great deal to each other.” The sentence is evidently intended as a statement, but takes a perverse interrogative twist at the end. “People may mean a great deal to each other without having a single taste in common,” she replies; and the answer leaves on both their minds a painful sense of having incomprehensibly offended on the one side, and of having bristled in uncalled-for defence on the other. The sands of their dual solitude are running out, and this is the way in which they are utilizing Féodorovna’s absence! In both their minds a feverish reckoning is going on as to how long it will take Miss Prince to send her stork-legs along the corridors and staircases that separate her from her impertinent parent, snub him, and return. Ten minutes is an ample latitude to give her, and of these five must have already fled. They cannot, cannot part upon that jarring last note. The rebellion against doing so is equally strong in both minds, but it is the woman who raises the cry of revolt. It is a cry that has no reference to anything that has passed before, it is only the unruly human heart calling out to its fellow from among the conventions. “I _am_ so glad that you are better!” “And I _am_ so glad that you altered your mind!” They laugh a little, like two happy children, relieved and blissful at the withdrawn cloud that leaves the blue of their tiny patch of heaven for its one moment undimmed. Both feel that the exchange of those two snapped sentences has turned Miss Prince’s prospective return from an unendurable to a quite supportable ill. “I think that you would find _that_ chair”--directing her by an imploring look to one in closer proximity to the bedside than that which she occupies--“a more comfortable one.” “Should I?” She makes the change. Are not all his whims to be gratified? They can see one another admirably now. He verifies a dimple, and she a scar. He makes no comment on his discovery. She does upon hers. “You have been wounded before?” she asks, with trembling interest. He puts his fore finger on a white cicatrice that runs across his lower cheek and jaw. “_That_ bit of a cut! Oh, I got that in the Soudan. It is an old story, and it was nothing worth mentioning. It did not keep me above a week in hospital.”