Having arrived at that position, he ceased calling himself a fool, and gave himself up to pleasant dreams and even more pleasant anticipations. Closing his eyes he recalled their conversation, recalled every expression of her sensitive face, every tone of her musical voice.
He fancied her sitting again by his bedside. How dainty she was, how unobtrusively and yet how exquisitely attired. Things he had been aware of in a sub-conscious way now clearly defined themselves. He remembered her teeth, even and white, her ears small and coloured like a sea-shell, her eyebrows dark and straight, her eyelashes long, her mouth like Cupid's bow. He remembered, too, how her rich brown hair grew low in her neck, while a massive coil seemed to balance her shapely head.
He smiled to himself at length. "How much I noticed," he said, "without seeming to notice. I wonder if other people think her so good to look upon."
He slept better that night than he had done since his accident, and through all his dreams Madeline seemed to glide, a healing and an inspiring presence. He awoke with his nerves thrilling like harpstrings, and a happy smile upon his lips.
He had dreamed that his invention had realised a thousand times more than he had ever hoped or imagined, that it had lifted him into the region of affluence and power, that he took his place among the successful men of his generation by right of what he had done, and that, thrilling with the knowledge of his success, he had laid his heart at the feet of Madeline Grover. "You have been my inspiration," he said to her. "But for my love for you I could not have wrought and striven as I have done," and for answer she laid her hands in his and lifted her face to be kissed; and then the twittering of the sparrows under the eaves awoke him.
"Dreams are curious things," he said, the smile still upon his lips. "Now I dream I fail, and now that I succeed. Both dreams cannot be true, that is certain. I wonder. I wonder."
He was still wondering when Mrs. Tuke brought him an early cup of tea.
"Have you slept well?" she asked, and there was a sympathetic note in her voice that he did not remember to have heard before.
"The best night I have yet had," he said, cheerfully.
"Then you don't think having so much company yesterday did you any harm?"