The sunlight falling on Stephen's bed and across his sleeping face shows a smile there, and his arm, lying on the coverlet—an arm thinned by constant fever and night-sweats—rests, in his thoughts, round her neck; that white neck so sweetly familiar in his dreams.
After a time he wakes and yawns, and turns his head heavily towards the window; and farther as the happy unconsciousness of sleep recedes from his face, and recollection and intelligence come back to it, more clearly show the haggard lines, traced all over it, of self-repression, seaming and marking it at five-and-twenty.
"Another day to be got through," he thinks merely, as Nature's most precious gift—the light—pours glowing through the panes.
When half-an-hour later he opens his door to take in his boots, he finds two letters with them, and at the sight of one his heart beats hard.
The other is in the girl's handwriting, and he lays it on his toilet-table, with the thought, "Asking me to go and see her, I suppose," and turns to the other with a mad impatience.
This is evidently the official letter with reference to his post—the post that means to him but this one thing: her possession.
He bursts it open, and in less than two seconds his eye takes in its news: he has the appointment.
The blood leaps over his face, and an exultant fire runs through his frame and along his veins.
He replaces the letter quietly in its cover with but the slightest tremor of his fingers.
Then he gets up from the bedside and stands in the middle of the room, looking through the sparkling panes.