"Oh, Hughie, you have come then," she said. "Welcome; you don't know how I wanted you!"

"Yes, I'm here all right," said Hugh in a voice scarcely audible. "But I'm so tired. It's horrible; it's like death!"

Nadine gave her little croaking laugh.

"It isn't like anything of the kind," she said. "But of course you are tired. Wouldn't it be a good thing to go to sleep?"

"I don't know," said Hugh.

"But I do. I'm tired too, Hughie, awfully tired. If I leaned my head back against your bed I should go to sleep too."

"Nadine, it is you?" said Hugh.

"Oh, my dear! What other girl could be with you?"

"No, that's true. Nadine, would it bore you to stop with me a bit? We might talk afterwards, when--when you've had a nap."

"That will be ripping," said Nadine, a.s.suming a sleepy voice.

There was silence for a little. Then once again, but in his own voice, Hugh spoke her name. This time she did not answer, and she felt his hand move till it rested against her plaited hair.

Then in the silence Nadine became conscious of another noise regular and slow as the faint hoa.r.s.e thunder of the sea, the sound of quiet breathing. After a while the doctor came round the head of the bed.

"We can manage to wrap you up, and make you fairly comfortable," he whispered. "I think he has a better chance of sleeping if you stop there."

The light and radiance in Nadine's eyes were a miracle of beauty, like some enchanted dawn rising over a virgin and unknown land. She smiled her unmistakable answer, but did not speak, and presently Dodo returned with pillows and blankets, which she spread over her and folded round her.

"The nurse will be in the next room," said the doctor; "call her if anything is wanted."

Dodo and the doctor went back to their rooms, and Nadine was left alone with Hugh. That night was the birthnight and the bridal-night of her soul: there was it born, and through the long hours of the winter night it watched beside its lover and its beloved, in that stillness of surrender to and absorption in another, that lies beyond and above the unrest of pa.s.sion amid the snows and sunshine of the uttermost regions to which the human spirit can aspire. She knew nothing of the pa.s.sing of the hours, nor for a long time did any thought or desire of sleep come near her eyelids, but the dim room became to her the golden island of which once in uncomprehending mockery she had spoken to Hugh. She knew it to be golden now, and so far from being unreal, there was nothing in her experience so real as it.

She could just turn her head without disturbing Hugh's hand that lay on her plaited hair, and from time to time she looked round at him. His face still wore the sunken pallor of exhaustion, but as his sleep, so still and even-breathing, began to restore the low-ebb of his vital force, it seemed to Nadine that the darkness of the valley of the shadow, to the entrance of which he had been so near, cleared off his face as eclipse pa.s.ses from the moon. How near he had been, she guessed, but it seemed to her that for the present his face was set the other way. She knew, too, that it was she who had had the power to make him look life-wards again, and the knowledge filled her with a sort of abasing pride. He had answered to her voice when he was past all other voices, and had come back in obedience to it.

She did not and she could not yet be troubled with the thought of anything else besides the fact that Hugh lived. As far as was known yet, he might never recover his activity of movement again, and years of crippled life were all that lay in front of him; but in the pa.s.sing away of the immediate imminent fear, she could not weigh or even consider what that would mean. Similarly the thought of Seymour lay for the present outside the focus of her mind: everything but the fact that Hugh lived was blurred and had wavering outlines. As the hours went on the oblongs of moonshine on the floor moved across the room, narrowing as they went. Then the moon sank and the velvet of the cloudless sky grew darker, and the stars more luminous. One great planet, tremulous and twinkling, made a glory beside which all the lesser lights paled into insignificance. No wind stirred in the great halls of the night, the moans and yells of its unquiet soul were still, and the boom of the surf grew ever less sonorous, like the thunder of a retreating storm.

Occasionally the night-nurse appeared at the doorway of the room adjoining, where she sat, and as often Nadine looked up at her smiling.

Once, very softly, she came round the head of the bed, and looked at Hugh, then bent down towards the girl.

"Won't you get some sleep?" she said, and Nadine made a little gesture of raised eyebrows and parted hands that was characteristic of her.

"I don't know," she whispered. "Perhaps not. I don't want to."

Then her solitary night vigil began again, and it seemed to her that she would not have bartered a minute of it for the best hour that her life had known before. The utter peace and happiness of it grew as the night went on, for still close to her head there came the regular uninterrupted breathing, and the weight, just the weight of a hand absolutely relaxed, lay on her hair. Not the faintest stir of movement other than those regular respirations came from the bed, and all the laughter and joy of which her days had been full was as the light of the remotest of stars compared to the glorious planet that sang in the windless sky, when weighed against the joy that that quiet breathing gave her. She did not color her consciousness with hope, she did not illuminate it by prayer; there was no room in her mind for anything except the knowledge that Hugh slept and lived.

It was now near the dawning of the winter day; the stars were paling in the sky, and the sky grew ensaffroned with the indescribable hue that heralds day. Footfalls, m.u.f.fled and remote, began to stir in the house, and far away there came the sound of crowing c.o.c.ks, faint but exultant, hailing the dawn. About that time, Nadine looked round once more at Hugh, and saw in the pallid light of morning that the change she had noticed before was more distinct. There had come back to his face something of the firm softness of youth, there had been withdrawn from it the droop and hardness of exhaustion. And turning again, she gave one sigh and fell fast asleep.

Lover and beloved they lay there sleeping, while the dawn brightened in the sky, she leaning against the bed where he was stretched, he with his hand on her hair. And strangely, the moment that she slept, their positions seemed to be reversed, and Hugh in his sleep appeared unconsciously to keep watch over and guard her, though all night she had been awake for him. Once her head slipped an inch or two, so that his hand no longer lay on her hair, but it seemed as if that movement reached down to him fathom-deep in his slumber and immediately afterwards his hand, which had lain so motionless and inert all night, moved, as if to a magnet, after that bright hair, seeking and finding it again. And dawn brightened into day, and the sun leaped up from his lair in the East, and still Nadine slept, and Hugh slept. It was as if until then the balance of vitality had kept the girl awake to pour into him of her superabundance: now she was drained, and sleep with the level stroke of his soft hand across the furrows of trouble and the jagged edges of injury and exhaustion comforted both alike.

It had been arranged after these events of storm that the party should disperse, and Dodo went to early breakfast downstairs with her departing guests, who were leaving soon after. But first she went into the nurse's room, next door to where Hugh lay, to make enquiries, and was taken by her to look into the sick-room. With daylight their sleep seemed only to have deepened: it was like the slumber of lovers who have been long awake in pa.s.sion of mutual surrender, and at the end have fallen asleep like children, with mere effacement of consciousness. Nadine's head was a little bowed forward, and her breath came not more evenly than his. It was the sleep of childlike content that bound them both, and bound them together.

Dodo looked long, and then with redoubled precaution moved softly into the nurse's room again, with mouth quivering between smiles and tears.

"My dear, I never saw anything so perfectly sweet," she said. "Do let them have their sleep out, nurse. And Nadine has slept in Hugh's room all night. What ducks! Please G.o.d it shall so often happen again!"

Nurse Bryerley was not unsympathetic, but she felt that explanations were needed.

"I understood the young lady was engaged to some one else," she said.

Dodo smiled.

"But until now no one has quite understood the young lady herself," she said. "Least of all, has she understood herself. I think she will find that she is less mysterious now."

"Mr. Graves will have to take some nourishment soon," said Nurse Bryerley.

Dodo considered.

"Then could you not give him his nourishment very cautiously, so that he will go to sleep again afterwards?" she asked. "I should like them to sleep all day like that. But then, you see, nurse, I am a very odd woman. But don't disturb them till you must. I think their souls are getting to know each other. That may not be scientific nursing, but I think it is sound nursing. It's too bad we can't eternalize such moments of perfect equilibrium."

"Certainly the young lady was awake till nearly dawn," said Nurse Bryerley. "It wouldn't hurt her to have a good rest."

Dodo beamed.

"Oh, leave them as long as possible," she said. "You have no idea how it warms my heart. There will be trouble enough when they awake."

Seymour was among those who were going by the early train, and when Dodo came down he had finished breakfast. He got up just as she entered.

"How is he?" he asked.

Dodo's warm approbation went out to him.

"It was nice of you to ask that first, dear Seymour," she said. "He is asleep: he has slept all night."

Seymour lit a cigarette.

"I asked that first," he said, "because it was a mixture of politeness and duty to do so. I suppose you understand."

Dodo took the young man by the arm.

"Come out and talk to me in the hall," she said. "Bring me a cup of tea."

The morning sunshine flooded the window-seat by the door, and Dodo sat down there for one moment's thought before he joined her. But she found that no thought was necessary. She had absolutely made up her mind as to her own view of the situation, and with all the regrets in the world for him, she was prepared to support it. In a minute Seymour joined her.

"Nadine came down to the beach just before Hugh went in yesterday morning," he said, "and she called out--called?--shouted out, 'Not you, Hughie: Seymour, Berts, anybody, but not you!' There was no need for me to think what that meant."

Dodo looked at him straight.

"No, my dear, there was no need," she said.

"Then I have been a--a farcical interlude," said he, not very kindly.