For Flossie (who may have felt latterly that she had chanced upon another season of depression in her woman’s trade) that illness was a piece of amazing good luck, coming as it did at the moment of Keith’s misgivings.  It not only drew them together, just as they were drifting insensibly apart, but it revealed them to each other in a tenderer and serener light.  There was a little hard spot in Flossie which was impervious to the subtler charm of Rickman when he was well.  But Rickman ill and at her mercy, confined to the bed where (so long as Flossie waited on him) he lay very quietly, with the sheet drawn tight up to his chin, in a state of touching dependence and humiliation, was a wholly different person from the stormy and incomprehensible Rickman who for more than two years had struggled so madly in her toils.  And if, to the eye of Mrs. Downey, Flossie appeared untouched by the really heartrending pathos of his attitude in sleep; beholding unmoved his huddled boyish form under the blankets, one half-naked arm laid slack along the bed, the other thrust out straight into the cold outside it; if she left Mrs. Downey to cover the poor fellow up, wondering why on earth the girl could sit there and never do it; if, when he woke, she missed the extreme poignancy of appeal in the murmurs that followed her as she went Beaver-like about her business in the room, it may be that in that unaccustomed service the hidden prescient motherhood in her was awakened and appeased (Flossie being still under the dominion of her dream).  As yet it struggled blindly with her invincible propriety; a struggle poor Rickman was made aware of by the half-averted manner of her approaches, the secrecy and hesitation of her touch.  But the little clerk undoubtedly found that patting pillows, straightening coverlets, and making mustard plasters, was an employment more satisfying to her nature than the perpetual handling of bank notes.  And to Rickman lying there with his hungry heart filled for the time quite full with its own humility and gratitude, lying in a helplessness that had in it something soothing and agreeable, feeling the soft shy woman’s hands about his bed, following with affectionate, remorseful eyes her coming and going, or watching as she sat patiently mending his socks, it came with the freshness of a new discovery that she was, after all, a very engaging little Beaver.  He had never for one instant glorified his love for her; he understood it too thoroughly.  It was love as Nature loves to have it; honest enough, too, but of its kind singularly devoid of any inspiring quality.  Flossie had never moved him to the making of sonnets or of songs.  Moreover, he had discovered in her a certain lack of tenderness, or of the outward signs of tenderness.  Not but what Flossie commanded all the foolish endearing language of young love; only she was apt to lavish it on little details of attire, on furniture, on things seen in shop-windows and passionately desired.