I don’t know when she slept at last; probably the ferment in her brain, coupled with her consciousness of my presence, kept her long awake. That she could sleep at all, trustful in that consciousness like a child, was sufficiently moving to me. And somewhere in the little hours she did sleep: I knew it, when it came, by the soft regularity of her breathing; and thereupon I rose, and padding it like a burglar, went away from her room into my own. Yet I could not pass her bed, I had not that self-command, but I must pause by it for one moment to look in her dear unconscious face. There was the tenderest flush upon the upturned cheek; the lips were the least bit parted; to look on innocent sleep is to know the bud before the flower, the locked secret, the loveliness nearest heaven. God forgive me!
CHAPTER XVIII
I awoke, somewhat late, and stretched myself with a sense of luxurious felicity. Then I clasped my hands under my head, and lay luminously dreaming. It was very still. The sun came in at my open window, filtered through a confusion of vivid leaves, and made of my common coverlet a woodland tapestry, intricately woven of gold and grey. Half closing my eyes, the oblong of light became to them crystal and liquescent, as if it were water blotted with innumerable globes of oily green. Those floated and travelled spasmodically, whisking back, as soon as started, on the movement of an eyelash, but always venturing again on voyages of insistent discovery. It was their business to carry little cargoes of sunshine and emerald into my brain; and presently I ceased to resist them, and they swam one by one into port and unloaded.
That betokened a surrender on my part to the delicious inconsequence of the hour. Self was entitled to consider self an imponderable quantity, in that interval of suspension between the attractions of night and day, and I let mine swing to what bias it listed, only blissfully watching, as it were, its direction. There was no question about that; nor did I desire there should be. It took me into glowing reveries which I indulged to the full, so long as that sense of irresponsible neutrality lasted. Yet it did not last long; bias itself was fatal to it, for bias must sooner or later convey a sense of weight, and a sense of weight brings us promptly to earth.
I came to earth presently, with a renunciatory yawn—and than a vast physical yawn there is nothing more dispelling to illusionment. I sat up in bed, and called to Fifine through the frail partition.
“Are you awake?”
She answered, “Yes,” and I demanded again, “Is your blind up?”
“Yes,” she said; and I put it to her thereupon:—
“Do you remember that waking impression of mine, that puzzled you so, of the plane trees seen outside a window on a bright morning? If you do, wink once and blink once at your window, and then tell me what is the visual effect on you.”
There was a pause; and then, “O, I have winked a fly into my eye!” wailed Fifine.