I shall send him the money.
CHAPTER XXIV
I have had a week of illness and it has been the happiest of my life.
Alicia has been my nurse and no one, I fervently hope, will ever discover that the larger half of that week has been sheer malingering. I might have got up in three days!
'Tis late to hearken, late to smile,
But better late than never
I shall have lived a little while,
Before I die forever.
The Shropshire Lad was perfectly right in the two middle lines of his quatrain, but oddly wrong in the others. It was not late to hearken or to smile. It never is late. Every moment has been heavenly for me. And who ever stops to dwell upon Purgatory once he has entered Paradise? I am very certain that by a law of spiritual physics past suffering is wiped out without a trace.
If "The Rosary" were not so absurd I should sing it to myself over and over. But being constructively a convalescent why may I not be absurd? Who shall say me nay? So being alone, I am humming the tune of "The Rosary" over and over and taking my pleasure in it.
The hours I have spent with Alicia no one can take from me. What a petulant patient I have been! I chuckle as I think of it. It's like Felix Culpa. Happy grippe-cold!
Alicia, let us say, brings me some broth upon a tray.
"Will you be comfortable, Uncle Ranny," she asks with concern in her voice, "until I come back with the rest?"