One afternoon in April, when he left her sleeping, he was aware of somewhat recklessly placing himself out of reach in a lonely excursion to a village demolished by the earthquake of 1887, and abandoned himself, in the impressions and incidents of his visit to the ruin, to a luxury of impersonal melancholy which the physician cannot often allow himself.  At last, his care found him, and drove him home full of a sharper fear than he had yet felt since the first days.  But Mr. Gerald was tranquilly smoking under a palm in the hotel garden, and met him with an easy smile.  “She woke once, and said she had had such a pleasant dream.  Now she’s off again.  Do you think we’d better wake her for dinner?  I suppose she’s getting up her strength in this way.  Her sleeping so much is a good symptom, isn’t it?”

Lanfear smiled forlornly; neither of them, in view of the possible eventualities, could have said what result they wished the symptoms to favor.  But he said:  “Decidedly I wouldn’t wake her”; and he spent a night of restless sleep penetrated by a nervous expectation which the morning, when it came, rather mockingly defeated.

Miss Gerald appeared promptly at breakfast in their pavilion, with a fresher and gayer look than usual, and to her father’s “Well, Nannie, you have had a nap, this time,” she answered, smiling: 

“Have I?  It isn’t afternoon, is it?”

“No, it’s morning.  You’ve napped it all night.”

She said:  “I can’t tell whether I’ve been asleep or not, sometimes; but now I know I have been; and I feel so rested.  Where are we going to-day?”

She turned to Lanfear while her father answered:  “I guess the doctor won’t want to go very far, to-day, after his expedition yesterday afternoon.”

“Ah,” she said, “I knew you had been somewhere!  Was it very far?  Are you too tired?”

“It was rather far, but I’m not tired.  I shouldn’t advise Possana, though.”

“Possana?” she repeated.  “What is Possana?”

He told her, and then at a jealous look in her eyes he added an account of his excursion.  He heightened, if anything, its difficulties, in making light of them as no difficulties for him, and at the end she said, gently:  “Shall we go this morning?”

“Let the doctor rest this morning, Nannie,” her father interrupted, whimsically, but with what Lanfear knew to be an inner yielding to her will.  “Or if you won’t let him, let me.  I don’t want to go anywhere this morning.”

Lanfear thought that he did not wish her to go at all, and hoped that by the afternoon she would have forgotten Possana.  She sighed, but in her sigh there was no concession.  Then, with the chance of a returning drowse to save him from openly thwarting her will, he merely suggested:  “There’s plenty of time in the afternoon; the days are so long now; and we can get the sunset from the hills.”