Something in the way Enid said this made him wince a little.  He felt his burning face grow a shade warmer.  Even after she went downstairs he kept wishing she had not said that.

His mother came to give him his medicine.  She stood beside him while he swallowed it.  “Enid Royce is a real sensible girl—­” she said as she took the glass.  Her upward inflection expressed not conviction but bewilderment.

Enid came every afternoon, and Claude looked forward to her visits restlessly; they were the only pleasant things that happened to him, and made him forget the humiliation of his poisoned and disfigured face.  He was disgusting to himself; when he touched the welts on his forehead and under his hair, he felt unclean and abject.  At night, when his fever ran high, and the pain began to tighten in his head and neck, it wrought him to a distressing pitch of excitement.  He fought with it as one bulldog fights with another.  His mind prowled about among dark legends of torture,—­everything he had ever read about the Inquisition, the rack and the wheel.

When Enid entered his room, cool and fresh in her pretty summer clothes, his mind leaped to meet her.  He could not talk much, but he lay looking at her and breathing in a sweet contentment.  After awhile he was well enough to sit up half-dressed in a steamer chair and play chess with her.

One afternoon they were by the west window in the sitting-room with the chess board between them, and Claude had to admit that he was beaten again.

“It must be dull for you, playing with me,” he murmured, brushing the beads of sweat from his forehead.  His face was clean now, so white that even his freckles had disappeared, and his hands were the soft, languid hands of a sick man.

“You will play better when you are stronger and can fix your mind on it,” Enid assured him.  She was puzzled because Claude, who had a good head for some things, had none at all for chess, and it was clear that he would never play well.

“Yes,” he sighed, dropping back into his chair, “my wits do wander.  Look at my wheatfield, over there on the skyline.  Isn’t it lovely?  And now I won’t be able to harvest it.  Sometimes I wonder whether I’ll ever finish anything I begin.”

Enid put the chessmen back into their box.  “Now that you are better, you must stop feeling blue.  Father says that with your trouble people are always depressed.”

Claude shook his head slowly, as it lay against the back of the chair.  “No, it’s not that.  It’s having so much time to think that makes me blue.  You see, Enid, I’ve never yet done anything that gave me any satisfaction.  I must be good for something.  When I lie still and think, I wonder whether my life has been happening to me or to somebody else.  It doesn’t seem to have much connection with me.  I haven’t made much of a start.”

“But you are not twenty-two yet.  You have plenty of time to start.  Is that what you are thinking about all the time!” She shook her finger at him.