“But,” she said again after a pause, still looking at the grate, “they had their priests and priestesses, and followers and people, hadn’t they?  It was their things I was looking at—­combs and brooches and hairpins, and things to cut their nails with.  They’re all in a glass case there.  And they had safety-pins, exactly like ours.”

“Oh, they were a civilised people,” said Ed cheerfully.  “It all gives you an idea.  I only hope you didn’t tire yourself out.  You’ll soon be all right, of course, but you have to be careful yet.  We’ll have a clean tablecloth, shall we?”

She had been seriously ill; her life had been despaired of; and somehow the young Polytechnic student seemed anxious to assure her that she was now all right again, or soon would be.  They were to be married “as soon as things brightened up a bit,” and he was very much in love with her.  He watched her head and neck as he continued to lay the table, and then, as he crossed once more to the cupboard, he put his hand lightly in passing on her hair.

She gave so quick a start that he too started.  She must have been very deep in her reverie to have been so taken by surprise.

“I say, Bessie, don’t jump like that!” he cried with involuntary quickness.  Indeed, had his hand been red-hot, or ice-cold, or taloned, she could not have turned a more startled, even frightened, face to him.

“It was your touching me,” she muttered, resuming her gazing into the grate.

He stood looking anxiously down on her.  It would have been better not to discuss her state, and he knew it; but in his anxiety he forgot it.

“That jumpiness is the effect of your illness, you know.  I shall be glad when it’s all over.  It’s made you so odd.”

She was not pleased that he should speak of her “oddness.”  For that matter, she, too, found him “odd”—­at any rate, found it difficult to realise that he was as he always had been.  He had begun to irritate her a little.  His club-footed reading of the verses had irritated her, and she had tried hard to hide from him that his cocksure opinions and the tone in which they were pronounced jarred on her.  It was not that she was “better” than he, “knew” any more than he did, didn’t (she supposed) love him still the same; these moods, that dated from her illness, had nothing to do with those things; she reproached herself sometimes that she was subject to such doldrums.

“It’s all right, Ed, but please don’t touch me just now,” she said.

He was in the act of leaning over her chair, but he saw her shrink, and refrained.

“Poor old girl!” he said sympathetically.  “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know.  It’s awfully stupid of me to be like this, but I can’t help it.  I shall be better soon if you leave me alone.”

“Nothing’s happened, has it?”

“Only those silly dreams I told you about.”

“Bother the dreams!” muttered the Polytechnic student.