Out on the veranda, his weakness, the pallid faces of the other convalescents, and even Doris herself, were forgotten as he gazed across the city and beyond to the sunlit spaces softly glowing beneath a cloudless sky.  Sunlight!  He had never known how much it meant, until then.  He breathed deep.  His dark eyes closed.  Life, which he had hitherto valued only through sheer animal instinct, seemed to mean so much more than he had ever imagined it could.  Yet not in any definite way, nor through contemplating any definite attainment.  It was simply good to be alive—­to feel the pleasant, natural warmth of the sun—­to breathe the clear, keen air.  And all his curiosity as to what the world might look like—­for to one who has come out of the eternal shadows the world is ever strange—­was drowned in the supreme indifference of absolute ease and rest.  It seemed to him as though he were floating midway between the earth and the sun, not in a weird dream wherein the subconscious mind says, “This is not real; I know that I dream”; but actual, in that Pete could feel nothing above nor beneath him.  Being of a very practical turn of mind he straightway opened his eyes and was at once conscious of the arm of the wheel-chair beneath his hand and the blanket across his knees.

He was not aware that some of the patients were gazing at him curiously—­that gossip had passed his name from room to room and that the papers had that morning printed a sort of revised sequel to the original story of “The Spider Mystery”—­as they chose to call it.

Doris glanced at her watch.  “We’ll have to go in,” she said, rising and adjusting Pete’s pillow.

“Oh, shucks!  We jest come out!”

“You’ve been asleep,” said Doris.

Pete shook his head.  “Nope.  But I sure did git one good rest.  Doc Andover calls this a vacation, eh?  Well, then I guess I got to go back to work—­and it sure is work, holdin’ down that bed in there—­and nothin’ to do but sleep and eat and—­but it ain’t so bad when you’re there.  Now that there cow-bunny with the front teeth—­”

“S-sh!” Doris flushed, and Pete glanced around, realizing that they were not alone.

“Well, I reckon we got to go back to the corral!” Pete sighed heavily.

Back in bed he watched Doris as she made a notation on the chart of his “case.”  He frowned irritably when she took his temperature.

“The doctor will want to know how you stood your first outing,” she said, smiling.

Pete wriggled the little glass thermometer round in his mouth until it stuck up at an assertive angle, as some men hold a cigar, and glanced mischievously at his nurse.  “Why don’t you light it?” he mumbled.

Doris tried not to laugh as she took the thermometer, glanced at it, and charted a slight rise in the patient’s temperature.

“Puttin’ it in that glass of water to cool it off?” queried Pete.

She smiled as she carefully charted the temperature line.