Then came a time when her speech was loosened and she talked to me incessantly of the child, until one day she spoke of it as living and clamoured for it, and relapsed into her fever.
At last one morning she awakened from a sound sleep and found me watching; for I had relieved the nurse at six o’clock. She smiled at me for the first time since the child fell sick, and took my hand and kissed it.
“It is like waking into heaven to see your face, Seer Marcous, darling,” she whispered.
“I hope heaven is peopled by a better-looking set of fellows,” I said.
“Hou!” laughed Carlotta. “Don’t you know you are beautiful?”
“You mustn’t throw an old jest in my teeth, Carlotta,” said I, and I reminded her how she had once screamed with laughter when I had told her I was very beautiful.
Carlotta listened patiently until I had ended, and then she said, with a little sigh:
“You cannot understand, Seer Marcous, darling. I have been thinking of my little baby and the angels—and all the angels are like you.”
To cover the embarrassment my modesty underwent, I laughed and drew the picture of myself with long flaxen hair and white wings.
“My angels hadn’t got wings,” said Carlotta, seriously. “They all wore dressing-gowns. They were real angels. And the one that was most like you brought my baby in his arms for me to kiss; and when he put it on a white cloud to sleep, and took me up in his arms instead and carried me away, away, away through the air, I didn’t cry at leaving baby. Wasn’t that funny? I snuggled up close to him—like that”—she illustrated the action of “snuggling” beneath the bed-clothes—“and it was so comfy.”