In his embarrassment, the hospital steward blushed under his tan, and stammered.

“Of course it’s the same young lady,” the Doctor answered, briskly.  “And I won’t let them drive her away.”  He turned to her, smiling gravely.  “I think his condition has ceased to be dangerous, madam,” he said.

People who in a former existence had been his friends, and Her brother, gathered about his stretcher and bore him through the crowd and lifted him into a carriage filled with cushions, among which he sank lower and lower.  Then She sat beside him, and he heard Her brother say to the coachman, “Home, and drive slowly and keep on the asphalt.”

The carriage moved forward, and She put her arm about him, and his head fell on her shoulder, and neither of them spoke.  The vision had lasted so long now that he was torn with the joy that after all it might be real.  But he could not bear the awakening if it were not, so he raised his head fearfully and looked up into the beautiful eyes above him.  His brows were knit, and he struggled with a great doubt and an awful joy.

“Dearest,” he said, “is it real?”

“Is it real?” she repeated.

Even as a dream, it was so wonderfully beautiful that he was satisfied if it could only continue so, if but for a little while.

“Do you think,” he begged again, trembling, “that it is going to last much longer?”

She smiled, and, bending her head slowly, kissed him.

“It is going to last—­always,” she said.

THE LION AND THE UNICORN

Prentiss had a long lease on the house, and because it stood in Jermyn Street the upper floors were, as a matter of course, turned into lodgings for single gentlemen; and because Prentiss was a Florist to the Queen, he placed a lion and unicorn over his flower-shop, just in front of the middle window on the first floor.  By stretching a little, each of them could see into the window just beyond him, and could hear all that was said inside; and such things as they saw and heard during the reign of Captain Carrington, who moved in at the same time they did!  By day the table in the centre of the room was covered with maps, and the Captain sat with a box of pins, with different-colored flags wrapped around them, and amused himself by sticking them in the maps and measuring the spaces in between, swearing meanwhile to himself.  It was a selfish amusement, but it appeared to be the Captain’s only intellectual pursuit, for at night the maps were rolled up, and a green cloth was spread across the table, and there was much company and popping of soda-bottles, and little heaps of gold and silver were moved this way and that across the cloth.  The smoke drifted out of the open windows, and the laughter of the Captain’s guests rang out loudly in the empty street, so that the policeman halted and raised his eyes reprovingly to the lighted windows, and cabmen drew up beneath them and lay in wait, dozing on their folded arms, for the Captain’s guests to depart.  The Lion and the Unicorn were rather ashamed of the scandal of it, and they were glad when, one day, the Captain went away with his tin boxes and gun-cases piled high on a four-wheeler.