“Paul!”
He looked now into the pale face of his wife ... and she was smiling.
“There, there,” said the great surgeon. “I told you she would come back. Her constitution——”
“Constitution!” scoffed the nurse. “It was you.”
“Or,” smiled the surgeon, magnanimously, “your prayers, sir.”
But the sick woman made a gesture of dissent.
“No,” she said, “it was none of those things. I came back when I remembered——”
“Paul,” she whispered, “lean down.”
He obeyed. Her palms fluttered against his cheeks, and, as lightly as a butterfly on a flower, her lips brushed his one closed eye and then the other. And then the girl who had been Ellen McCartney laughed a low, thrilling laugh, which spoke of youth in love in the springtime.