"With pleasure when you are a little stronger—"
"I'm all right now—"
He stood looking seriously at the bare flower-bed along the wall where amber shoots of peonies were feathering out into palmate grace, and older larkspurs had pushed up into fringed mounds of green foliage.
She had knelt down on the bed's edge, trowel in hand, pink sun-bonnet fallen back neglected; and with blade and gloved fingers she began transferring the irresponsible larkspur seedlings to the confines of their proper spheres, patting each frail little plant into place caressingly.
And he was thinking of her as he had last seen her—on her knees at the edge of another bed, her hair fallen unheeded as her sun-bonnet hung now, and the small hands clasping, twisting, very busy with their agony—as busy as her gloved fingers were now, restlessly in motion among the thickets of living green.
"Tell me," she said, not looking back over her shoulder, "it must be heavenly to be out of doors again."
"It is rather pleasant," he assented.
"Did you—they said you had dreadful visions. Did you?"
He laughed. "Some of them were absurd, Shiela; the most abominably grotesque creatures came swarming and crowding around the bed—faces without bodies—creatures that grew while I looked at them, swelling to gigantic proportions—Oh, it was a merry carnival—"
Neither spoke. Her back was toward him as she knelt there very much occupied with her straying seedlings in the cool shade of the wall.