The pale sunshine of a fine February morning filtered into the room from behind the curtains. I turned off the dimmed electric lamp and let full daylight into the room.
“Oh!” cried Carlotta, turning to the window, “how lovely the good sun is! It is more like heaven than ever. Do you know,” she added, mysteriously, “just before I woke it was all dark, and I had lost my angels and I was looking for them.”
I counselled her sagely to look for no more members of the Hierarchy en deshabille, but to content herself with the humbler denizens of this planet. She pressed my hand.
“I’ll try to be contented, Seer Marcous, darling.”
She did her best, poor child, when I was by; but I heard that often she would sit by a little pile of garments and take them up one by one and cry her heart out—so that though she quickly recovered, her cheeks remained wan and drawn, and pain lingered in her eyes. The weather changed to fog and damp and she spent the days crouching by the fire, sometimes not stirring a muscle for an hour together. Her favourite seat was the fender-stool in the drawing-room. Her own boudoir downstairs, where she used to receive instruction from the excellent Miss Griggs, she scarcely entered.
She broke one of these fits suddenly and called me by her own pet version of my name. I looked up from the writing-table where I was studying the Arabic grammar.
“Yes?”
“I have been thinking—oh, thinking, thinking so long. I’ve been thinking that you must love me very much.”
“Yes, Carlotta,” said I, with a half smile. “I suppose I do.”
“As much as I loved my baby,” she said, seriously,