“Will you tell me your name?”

“Savelli.  Paul Savelli.”

“I thought so.  It was in the two books in your knapsack.  A historical Italian name.”

“Yes,” said Paul.  “Noble.  All dead.”

He lay back, exhausted.  Suddenly a thought smote him.  He beckoned.  She approached.  “My heart—­is it safe?” he whispered.

“Your heart?”

“At the end of my watch-chain.”

“Quite safe.”

“Could I have it near me?”

“Of course.”

Paul closed his eyes contentedly.  With his talisman in his hand, all would be well.  For the present he need take thought of nothing.  His presence in the beautiful room being explained, there was an end of the perplexity of his semi-delirium.  Of payment for evident devoted service there could be no question.  Time enough when he grew well and able to fare forth again, to consider the immediate future.  He was too weak to lift his head, and something inside him hurt like the devil when he moved.  Why worry about outer and unimportant matters?  The long days of pain and illness slipped gradually away.  Miss Winwood sat by his bedside and talked; but not until he was much stronger did she question him as to his antecedents.  The Archdeacon had gone away after a week’s visit without being able to hold any converse with Paul; Colonel Winwood was still at Contrexeville, whence he wrote sceptically of the rare bird whom Ursula had discovered; and Ursula was alone in the house, save for a girl friend who had no traffic with the sick-chamber.  She had, therefore, much leisure to devote to Paul.  Her brother’s scepticism most naturally strengthened her belief in him.  He was her discovery.  He grew almost to be her invention. just consider.  Here was a young Greek god—­everyone who had a bowing acquaintance with ancient sculpture immediately likened Paul to a Greek god, and Ursula was not so far different from her cultured fellow mortals as to liken him to anything else—­here was a young Phoebus Apollo, all the more Olympian because of his freedom from earthly ties, fallen straight from the clouds.  He had fallen at her feet.  His beauty had stirred her.  His starlike loneliness had touched her heart.  His swift intelligence, growing more manifest each day as he grew stronger, moved her admiration.  He had, too, she realized, a sunny and sensuous nature, alive to beauty—­even the beauty of the trivial things in his sickroom.  He had an odd, poetical trick of phrase.  He was a paragon of young Greek gods.  She had discovered him; and women don’t discover even mortal paragons every day in the week.  Also, she was a woman of forty-three, which, after all, is not wrinkled and withered eld; and she was not a soured woman; she radiated health and sweetness; she had loved once in her life, very dearly.  Romance touched her with his golden feather and, in the most sensible and the most unreprehensible way in the world, she fell in love with Paul.