"The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time."
--EMERSON.
The improvement in Francis Heathcote's condition in the days which followed was, so the doctor and nurses declared, phenomenal. Robert Gale ceased to tug at his beard in angry perplexity, and melted into something which might almost have been called jocularity, as he watched the man gaining in health and strength. "Splendid! Splendid!" he would say, rubbing his hands together in satisfaction. "Go on as you are going, and you'll see the last of me soon."
And as the days went by, peacefully and seemingly uneventfully, the time she spent with Francis became more and more the pivot on which Philippa's whole mind and thought turned. Day by day, almost hour by hour, he appeared to gain visibly in vigour. The cheerfulness and high spirits which had characterised him in an unusual degree before his accident, returned to him; and she marvelled increasingly at the almost boyish gaiety which he evinced at times. There were moments when she had perforce to remind herself of the long years of loneliness and deprivation through which he had passed. They seemed to have left no mark on him. And yet she could not think they were forgotten, for once--it was at her second visit to him--he spoke at some length of his illness. Not, however, with any bitterness or annoyance, but merely as one might mention a curious experience through which one had lived, and for which one was little or none the worse.
"It is all so muddled to me. Sometimes it seems as if I had waited years for the sight of your face, and then again it would seem only the day before that I had seen you. Sometimes I saw you so clearly that I thought you were in the room, only I never could get you to speak to me. And I never could touch you. The moment I thought you were coming nearer you went away altogether. That was what bothered me. I suppose it was imagination or some kind of delirium, but it was rather dreadful, for when I couldn't see you everything was swallowed up in a horrible darkness. It was only when you came that there was daylight at all, the rest was a dreadful night."
"Don't talk of it," she had begged him, "it is over now." And seeing that the subject distressed her he had not spoken of it again.
Philippa found no difficulty in amusing him, or distracting his attention from anything which her intuition warned her might lead to dangerous questioning. She sang to him, and read to him, choosing lighter stories from the magazines, and preferably those in which the plot was laid in other countries or in previous centuries. He showed no signs of bewilderment when such events as the Indian Mutiny or the French Revolution were mentioned, and the girl could not be sure whether he listened without comprehending, for the mere pleasure of hearing her voice and knowing her companionship, or whether some feeling of half-shamed reticence prevented his acknowledging that he had never heard of these things before.