When I came to I felt weak and queer and did not at first open my eyes. I heard subdued voices all about me, as of an interested crowd; I felt all wet, I felt the cold of a wet mosaic pavement under me, but my head and shoulders were pillowed on a support wet indeed, as I was, but soft and warm.
I opened my eyes.
I realized that my head was in Vedia's lap, for I saw above me her dripping breasts and, higher, her anxious face looking down at mine.
I fainted again.
CHAPTER VIII
THE WATER-GARDEN
Just how long I was entirely unconscious I do not know. For after I began to come to myself at intervals which grew shorter, for periods which grew longer, I was too weak to move a muscle or to utter a syllable. I lay, flaccid, in my big, deep, soft bed, very dimly aware of Occo or of Agathemer hovering about me, generally recalled to consciousness by an eggspoonful of hot spiced wine being forced through my slow-opening lips and teeth.
How many times I was sufficiently conscious to know that I was being fed, but too ill for any thoughts whatever, I cannot conjecture. When I began to have mental feelings the first was one of dazed confusion of mind, of groping to recollect where I was and why and what had last happened to me.
When I recalled my last waking experience I lay bathed in sleepy contentment. I could think connectedly enough to reason out, or my unthinking intuitions presented to me without my thinking, the conviction that, if Vedia could recognize me in a big pool among scores of swimmers, if her perceptions in regard to me were acute enough and quick enough for her and her alone to notice that I had fainted in the water, if she cared enough for me and was sufficiently indifferent to what society might say of her, for her to rescue me and sit down on the pavement of the tepidarium and pillow my wet head on her wet thighs till I showed signs of life, I need not worry about whether Vedia cared for me or not. I was permeated with the conviction that, however difficult it might be to get her to acknowledge it, however great or many might be the obstacles in the way of my marrying her, Vedia loved me almost as consumedly as I loved her.
In this frame of mind I convalesced steadily, if slowly, incurious of the flight of time, of news, of anything; content to get well whenever it should please the gods and confident that happiness, even if long deferred, was certain to follow my recovery.