The weather was hot; boxes of mignonette,
some heliotropes, and lemon-scented
verbenas, were in my balcony. She watered
them of an evening, and let the windows
bo open and the scent of them float in to
me as I lay and watched her at her work.

While this delicious languid luxury of
convalescence lasted, and did not pall
upon me, why should I wish to get well?
While she was there to feed me, I would
not raise a hand to feed myself.

The truth was, that my nurse, my perfect
nurse, of whom Dr. Fearnwell now and
again spoke with an enthusiasm and effusion
that would fire my weak brain with sudden
jealousy; my nurse, who would, in
untiring watchfulness and self-forgetting
devotion to her task, have been a perfect
nurse for any man who had been
indifferent to her, to whom she had been
indifferent, was now a most pernicious
nurse to me.

I loved her with a desperate sort of
passion: a love far more of the senses than
the heart.

She was neither an innocent nor an
ignorant woman. She knew exactly what to
do and what to leave undone. She gave
me no chance of growing indifferent through
familiarity, if, indeed, with such beauty as
hers that could have been possible. As I
grew better, though always on duty near me,
she was less and less in my room; ever
oftener and oftener, when I longed in those
cold half-swoonings and icy sweats of
weakness, with an almost delirious longing
to feel myself soothed and cherished, as on
that first season of consciousness, by her
close presence, there came to my call, not
Mrs. Rosscar, but the other nurse, with her
good-tempered face, and her form,
from which—reducing, as it did, the
sublime to the ridiculous, and the lovely to
the loathsome, in its caricaturing exaggeration
of all feminine charms—I turned in
disgust.

Every day Mrs. Rosscar seemed to me
more beautiful. Every day I seemed to
feel her beauty more bewilderingly and
overpoweringly. Not so much the beauty
of her face; it was strange how unfamiliar
that remained to me, and how seldom I had
a full look into it; whenever it was possible,
it was averted from me; her eyes shunned
mine, and she kept the room so dim, that
I had little chance of studying her
expression. If I noticed this, I accounted
to myself for it by supposing her to be
growing conscious of the burning fever of
my passion. Not so much did the beauty
of her face, I say, bind me prisoner. It
was the beauty of her presence that so
grew upon me: of her whole physical self,
as it were. Of her mind and heart I knew
nothing. With the music of her
movement, the gracious delicacy and harmony
of all she did, I was more and more
captivated.

The accidents of the, sick room, the
perfect postures into which her limbs would
fall when she slept the sleep of exhaustion,
on the couch at the far end of my chamber,
made me more and more conscious of the
wonderful and rare perfection of proportion
of her physical beauty. And yet it
was something beyond this that enchained
me.

Has the body a soul apart from the
soul's soul?

Is there a soul of physical beauty?

But what I mean, escapes me as I
struggle to express it.

In my strange passion for her, there was
always something of fear.

Sometimes, in the night, I would lie
awake, leaning on my elbow, and watch her
sleep, and follow the rising and the falling
of the now childless breast. At those times
I always thought about the child, and
wondered how she thought and how she suffered,
and I wondered with a great awe. Was her
heart dead? About all her soft gentleness
there was no touch of tenderness. Did she
nurse me mechanically, not caring whether
it was I or another? Then recurred to
me the first words I had heard her speak
when I revived to consciousness: " That
he may not die, great God, that he may
not die!"

Remembering these first words of hers, I
could hardly think her tendance mechanical
or indifferent. Was she grateful to
me, knowing I would have saved and
healed her child? Then returned to me
the scene by the small bed—the awful eyes,
the uplifted arms. Often, at this point of
my thinking, I would cry aloud to find
myself bathed in that terrible cold sweat,
and my cry would wake her, and her
approach would then fill me with dread.

For a long time, things went on without
change. I got neither worse nor better.
Dr. Fearnwell grew impatient.

"Your heart continues strangely weak
and irritable," he said one day; saying it,
he looked—I believe it was a pure accident
from me to Mrs. Rosscar, and back to
me. The sudden rush of heat to my face,
then, possibly, suggested something to
him; for he considered me gravely, and