He was always reading or writing or going somewhere with a kind of hidden, misty aim in his most objectless journeys. After--as the necessity for such occupation wore away, and he lapsed back into the old listless ways of dreaming--his thoughts were always busy with the future; never now did he indulge in those wayward dreams of old. They had a dangerous tendency to take a certain forbidden way. Finally, this self-control became a habit, and he scarcely felt its necessity. The 'might have been' never came back more poignantly than as a vague, shadowy regret, that gave everything a slightly flat and unpalatable taste. But he did not take life any less fully, or with any abatement of whatever earnestness was in him. Men are not patient under sickness, at least not that unquestioning, unresisting patience which most women and the lower animals show. These especially who are usually well and robust are a trial to the flesh and spirit of those about them. Moore was not the wonderful exception. His first few weeks in the hospital were not so bad; but when the actual racking pain was over, and nothing remained but that halting of the physical machinery to which we never give a thought during perfect action--the weakness hanging leaden weights to every limb, the unwonted nervousness and irritability, the apparently causeless necessity for inaction--he was anything but a resigned man. Captain George, getting his furlough and carrying him off, was blessed from the deepest heart of the ward nurses. He had a kind of feeling that this his first illness was a matter in which the universe should be concerned, and with that fretful self-exaggeration came that other unutterable yearning that attends the first proof that we are coheirs with others to the ills flesh is heir to, weary homesickness and childish desire for sympathy. So now, weakened physically with that strange new heartsickness, paralyzing his will and giving freer scope to is feverish impatience, George's careless words had rolled away the stone from the sepulchre, and its prisoners were free. Not dead, not having lost a shade of color from their wings, they nestled and gleamed through his heart, filling the summer day with just such intangible perfect witchery as those other days had been full of. Perhaps, too, time and absence had heightened the charm. Imagination has such a way of catching up little scenes and words and looks, and, without altering one of the facts, haloing them with such a golden deceptive atmosphere, adding, day by day, faintest touches, that they grow by and by into a something wholly different. So that fortnight came back to him, an illuminated poem, along rich strains of music, making every nerve thrill with the pleasure-pain of its associations.