Dr. Blake, partly because adventure had kept him over-young, held still his basic, youthful ideas about the proper environment for woman.  Whenever the name “Aunt Paula,” softened with the accents of affection, proceeded from that low, contralto voice, it hurt the new thing, greater than any conventional idea, which was growing up in him.  He even suspected, at such times, what might be the “something nobler than nursing.”

A big apple tree shaded the sidelines of the Mountain House tennis court.  A bench fringed its trunk.  Annette threw herself down, back against the bark.  It was late afternoon.  The other house-guests droned over bridge on the piazzas or walked in the far woods; they were alone out-of-doors.  And Annette, always, until now, so chary of confidences, developed the true patient’s weakness and began to talk symptoms.

“It is curious the state I’m in before Aunt Paula sends me away,” she said; “I was a nervous child, and though I’ve outgrown it, I still have attacks of nerve fag or something like it.  I can feel them coming on and so can she.  You know we’ve been together so much that it’s like—­like two bees in adjoining cells.  The cell-wall has worn thin; we can almost touch.  She knows it often before I do.  She makes me go to bed early; often she puts me to sleep holding my hand, as she used to do when I was a little girl.  But even sleep doesn’t much help.  I come out of it with a kind of fright and heaviness.  I have little memories of curious dreams and a queer sense, too, that I mustn’t remember what I’ve dreamed.  I grow tired and heavy—­I can always see it in my face.  Then Aunt Paula sends me away, and I become all right again—­as I am now.”

Blake did not express the impatient thought of his mind.  He only said: 

“A little sluggishness of the blood and a little congestion of the brain.  I had such sleep once after I’d done too much work and fought too much heat in the Cavite Hospital.  Only with me it took the form of nightmare—­mostly, I was in process of being boloed.”

“Yes, perhaps it was that”—­her eyes deepened to their most faraway blue—­“and perhaps it is something else.  I think it may be.  Aunt Paula thinks so, too, though she never says it.”

What was the something?  Did she stand again on the edge of revelation?  Events had gone past the time when he could wait patiently for her confidence, could approach it through tact.  It was the moment not for snipping but for bold charging.  And his blood ran hot.

“This something—­won’t you tell me what it is?  Why are you always so mysterious with me?  Why—­when I want to know everything about you?” After he had said this, he knew that there was no going backward.  Doubts, fears, terrors of conventionalities, awe of his conservative, blood-proud mother in Paris—­all flew to the winds.

Perhaps she caught something of this in his face, for she drew away a trifle and said: