[Illustration: The main thing was proper nursing.]
Outside, the wind was whistling. The steady heating of an oak branch on the porch roof told me it was blowing hard. It sounded cold. Mary stood tiptoe to reach my collar and turn it up. Then she buttoned me snug around the neck. It was the first time a woman had ever done that for me. How good it was! I absently turned the collar down again and tore my coat open. Then I smiled.
Again she raised herself tiptoe before me, and with a hand on each shoulder, she stood looking from her eyes into mine.
"You fraud!" she cried.
Then I laughed. Lord, how I laughed! Twenty-four years I had lived, and until now I had never known a real joke, one that made the heart beat quicker, and sent the blood singing through the veins; that made the fingers tingle, the ears burn, and brought tears to the eyes. I don't suppose that other people would have thought this one so amusing. The young doctor upstairs might not have feigned a smile, for instance. That was what made it all the better for me, for it was my own joke and Mary's, and in all the world I was the only man who could see the fun of it.
"When you turn that collar up again I am going," said I.
So she sprang away from me, laughing, and quick as I reached out to seize her, she avoided me.
"You know I can't catch you," I cried, taunting her, "so I must wait."
As she stood there before me quietly, her hands clasped, her eyes looking up into mine, I saw how fair she was, and I wondered. The picture of Weston in the woods, standing off there gazing at me, came back then, and with it a vague feeling of fear and distrust. I saw myself as Weston saw me, and I marvelled.
"Mary," I said, "this morning up there in the woods I told Robert Weston everything, and he stood off just as you are standing now. It seemed to me he wondered how it could be true, and now I wonder too. Maybe it's all a mistake."