"Kiss me," he murmured suddenly, "and I'll go to sleep."
And since at all costs he must be coaxed to slumber, she kissed him for the woman who was not there.
*****
Slowly he turned the corner, slowly.
And at last she found him watching her one morning as she came towards him with a cup in her hand, across the great, wide room. She liked this room; it was so vast and simple. Its battered furniture must have been his when he was a boy. And there was no clutter of pictures and photographs; only a few ancient oil-paintings of hounds and horses. Above his bed a square patch in the wall-paper that was unfaded, betrayed where a woman's portrait had hung once and had been taken down.
"Hullo!" he said.
He lay looking at her, thin and haggard, but his whimsical smile unchanged.
"It's she," he said, "or is it the stuff that dreams are made of?"
"It is she," said Susan.
"I've been ill, haven't I?" he said. "And I say, Susan, have you been nursing me?"