"Like his lips!" she thinks, as it
presses on her throat. "And as cold as his nature."
* * * * *
The following morning is calm and still--a perfect specimen of
wintry beauty. A light frost covers the ground and sparkles on the
trees.
There is a faint chill in the clear air, a tranquil calm on the
gently rising and falling sea and in the lucid sky.
The sunlight falling on Stephen's bed and across his sleeping face
shows a smile there, and his arm, lying on the coverlet--an arm
thinned by constant fever and night-sweats--rests, in his thoughts,
round her neck; that white neck so sweetly familiar in his dreams.
After a time he wakes and yawns, and turns his head heavily towards
the window; and farther as the happy unconsciousness of sleep
recedes from his face, and recollection and intelligence come back
to it, more clearly show the haggard lines, traced all over it, of
self-repression, seaming and marking it at five-and-twenty.
"Another day to be got through," he thinks merely, as Nature's most
precious gift--the light--pours glowing through the panes.
When half-an-hour later he opens his door to take in his boots, he
finds two letters with them, and at the sight of one his heart
beats hard.
The other is in the girl's handwriting, and he lays it on his
toilet-table, with the thought, "Asking me to go and see her, I
suppose," and turns to the other with a mad impatience.
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