“Well, that’s all right then,” she said.  “Because those were Doctor Darby’s orders.  You weren’t to be excited or worried about anything.  But, John, is it really true that you don’t?  Not about anything?”

The fact that her face was still turned away as she asked that question gave it a significance which could not be overlooked.

“It’s perfectly true,” he asserted.  “I don’t believe I could if I tried.  But there’s something evidently troubling you.  Let’s have it.  Oh, don’t be afraid.  You’ve no idea what an—­Olympian position one finds himself in when he has got half-way across the Styx and come back.  Tell me about it.”

“You know all about it already.  I told you the first day you could talk—­that I was going to give up singing altogether except just for you,—­when you wanted me to.  I knew I’d been torturing you about it.  I thought perhaps you’d get well quicker,—­want to get well more—­if you knew that the torture wasn’t to go on.  It was true and it is true.  Perhaps you thought it was just one of those lies that people tell invalids—­one of those don’t-worry things.  Well, is wasn’t.

“But you made me promise I wouldn’t do anything—­wouldn’t break my Ravinia contract—­until we could talk it all out together.  Your temperature went up a little that afternoon and when Doctor Darby asked me why, I told him.  He said I mustn’t, on any account, speak again to you about it until you brought the subject up yourself.  I don’t know whether he’d call this bringing it up or not, but anyway that’s it.  I’ve kept my promise to you though,” she concluded.  “I haven’t written.  They still think I am going to sing this summer.”

“I am very glad of that,” he said quietly.  “I thought the thing was settled by our first talk.  I didn’t realize that you had taken it merely as an—­adjournment.”

She was still turned rigidly away from him, but the grip of one of her hands upon the arm of a chair betrayed the excitement she was laboring under, while it showed the effort she was making to hold it down.

“I didn’t think, though,” he went on, “that that resolution of yours to give up your whole career,—­make ducks and drakes of it, in obedience to my whim—­was nothing more than one of those pious lies that invalids are fed upon.  I knew you meant it, my dear.  I knew you’d have done it—­then—­without a falter or a regret.”

“Then or now,” she said.  “It’s all the same.  No, it isn’t!  Now more than then.  With less regret.  Without a shadow of a regret, John,—­if it would bring you back to me.”

The last words were muffled, for she had buried her face in her hands.

He had heard the ring of undisguised passion in her voice without an answering pulse-beat, sat looking at her thoughtfully, tenderly.  The reflection that occupied his mind was with what extravagant joy he would have received such an assurance only a few weeks ago.  On any one of those last days before his illness fastened upon him;—­the Sunday he had gone to Hickory Hill alone because Paula had found she must work with March that day; the evening when he had made his last struggle against the approaching delirium of fever in order to telephone for an ambulance to get him out of that hated house.  What a curious compound of nerve ends and gland activities a man’s dreams—­that he lived by, or died for—­were!