CHAPTER V.
"Vous avez bien froid, la belle;
Comment vous appelez-vous?
Les amours et les yeux doux
De nos cercueils sont les clous.
Je suis la morte, dit-elle.
Cueillez la branche de houx."
Victor Hugo.
AS John lay impatiently patient upon his bed in the round oak-panelled room at Overleigh during the weeks that followed his accident, his thoughts by day, and by night, varied no more than the notes of a chaffinch in the trees outside.
"Oh, let the solid earth
Not fail beneath my feet,
Before I too have found
What some have found so sweet!"
That was the one constant refrain. The solid earth had nearly failed beneath his feet, nearly—nearly. If the world might but cohere together and not fly off into space; if body and soul might but hold together till he had seen Di once more, till he knew for certain from her own lips that she loved him! Unloved by any woman until now, wistfully ignorant of woman's tenderness, even of its first alphabet learned at a mother's knee, unread in all its later language,—in these days of convalescence a passionate craving was upon him to drink deep of that untasted cup which "some have found so sweet."
He had Mitty, and Mitty at least was radiantly happy during these weeks, with John fast in bed, and in a condition to dispense with other nursing than hers. She sat with him by the hour together, mending his socks and shirts, for she would not suffer any one to touch his clothes except herself, and discoursing to him about Di—a subject which she soon perceived never failed to interest him.
"Miss Dinah," Mitty would say for the twentieth time, but without wearying her audience—"now, there's a fine upstanding lady for my lamb."