"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, assuming 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 hoarse 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 passion amid the snows and sunshine of the uttermost regions to which the human spirit can aspire. She knew nothing of the passing 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.