“Sigrid!” he exclaimed, in a tone of such relief that tears started to her eyes.
She bent down and kissed him.
“I have come to take care of you. And after you have been to sleep we will have a long talk,” she said gently. “There, let me make your pillows comfortable.”
Her presence, instead of exciting him to wonder or to ask questions, acted upon him like a soothing spell.
“Talk,” he said. “It is so good to hear Norse once more.”
“I will talk if you will try to sleep. I will sit here and say you some of Björnsen’s songs.” And, with his hand still in hers, she said, in her quieting voice, “Jeg har sogt,” and “Olaf Trygvason,” and “Prinsessen.”
This last seemed specially to please him, and while, for the sixth time, she was repeating it, Roy, who had been watching them intently, made her a little sign, and, glancing down, she saw that Frithiof had fallen asleep. No one stirred, for they all knew only too well how much depended on that sleep. The nurse, who was one of those cheerful and buoyant characters that live always in the present—and usually in the present of others—mused over her three companions, and settled in her practical mind the best means of relieving Sigrid without disturbing the patient.
Sigrid herself was living in the past, and was watching sadly enough Frithiof’s altered face. Could he ever again be the same strong, hardy, dauntless fellow he had once been? She remembered how in the old days he had come back from hunting fresh and invigorated when every one else had been tired out. She thought of his room in the old home in Kalvedalen with its guns and fishing-tackle, its reindeer skins and bear skins, its cases of stuffed birds, all trophies of his prowess. And then she looked round this dreary London room, and thought how wretched it must have felt to him when night after night he returned to it and sat working at translations in which he could take no sort of interest.
As for Roy, having lived for so many days in that sick-room with scarcely a thought beyond it, he had now plunged into a sudden reaction; a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders. Sigrid had come, and with one bound he had stepped into a bright future; a future in which he could always watch the fair, womanly face now before him; a future in which he should have the right to serve and help her, to shield her from care and turn her poverty to wealth. But that last thought brought a certain anxiety with it. For he fancied that Sigrid was not without a share of Frithiof’s independent pride. If once she could love him the question of money could, of course, make no difference, but he feared that her pride might perhaps make out of her poverty and his riches a barrier which should shut out even the thought of love.
Of all those who were gathered together in that room, Frithiof was the most entirely at rest, for at last there had come to his relief the priceless gift of dreamless and unbroken sleep. For just as the spiritual life dies within us if we become absorbed in the things of this world and neglect the timeless calm which is our true state, so the body and mind sink if they cannot for brief intervals escape out of the bonds of time into the realms of sleep. The others lived in past, present, or future, but Frithiof lay in that blissful state of entire repose which builds up, all unconsciously to ourselves, the very fibers of our being. What happens to us in sleep that we wake once more like new beings? No one can exactly explain. What happens to us when