If she was taking a holiday with deliberate intention she did it well. In a few days Janey was well enough to be carried out and laid on one of the two hammocks swung beneath the trees, and then far the greater part of the day was spent in the open air. To Tredennis it seemed that Bertha made the most of every hour, whether she swung in her hammock with her face upturned to the trees, or sat reading, or talking as she worked with the decorous little basket, at which she had jeered, upon her knee. He was often reminded in these days of what the professor had said of her tenderness for her children. It revealed itself in a hundred trifling ways, in her touch, in her voice, in her almost unconscious habit of caring for them, and, more than all, in a certain pretty, inconvenient fashion they had of getting close to her, and clinging about her, at all sorts of inopportune moments. Once when she had run to comfort Meg who had fallen down, and had come back to the hammock, carrying her in her arms, he was betrayed into speaking. "I did not think,"--he began, and then he checked himself guiltily. "You did not think?" she repeated. He began to recognize his indiscretion. "I beg your pardon," he said, "I was going to make a blunder." She sat down in the hammock, with the child in her arms. "You were going to say that you did not think I cared so much for my children," she said, gently. "Do you suppose I did not know that? Well, perhaps it was not a blunder. Perhaps it is only one of my pretences." "Don't speak like that," he implored. The next instant he saw that tears had risen in her eyes. "No," she said. "I will not. Why should I? It is not true. I love them very much. However bad you are, I think you must love your children. Of course, my saying that I loved them might go for nothing; but don't you see," she went on with a pathetic thrill in her voice, "that they love _me_? They would not love me, if I did not care for them." "I know that," he returned remorsefully. "It was only one of my blunders, as I said. But you have so bewildered me sometimes. When I first returned I could not understand you. It was as if I found myself face to face with a creature I had never seen before." "You did," she said. "That was it. Perhaps I never was the creature you fancied me." "Don't say that," he replied. "Since I have been here I have seen you as I used to dream of you, when I sat by the fire in my quarters in the long winter nights." "Did you ever think of me like that?" she said slowly, and with surprise in her face. He had not thought of what he was revealing, and he did not think of it now. "I never forgot you," he said. "Never." "It seems very strange--to hear that now," she said. "I never dreamed of your thinking of me--afterwards. You seemed to take so little notice of me." "It is my good fortune," he said, with a touch of bitterness, "that I never _seem_ to take notice of anything."