Progress

"The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time."
--EMERSON.

The improvement in Francis Heathcote's condition in the days which followed was, so the doctor and nurses declared, phenomenal. Robert Gale ceased to tug at his beard in angry perplexity, and melted into something which might almost have been called jocularity, as he watched the man gaining in health and strength. "Splendid! Splendid!" he would say, rubbing his hands together in satisfaction. "Go on as you are going, and you'll see the last of me soon."

And as the days went by, peacefully and seemingly uneventfully, the time she spent with Francis became more and more the pivot on which Philippa's whole mind and thought turned. Day by day, almost hour by hour, he appeared to gain visibly in vigour. The cheerfulness and high spirits which had characterised him in an unusual degree before his accident, returned to him; and she marvelled increasingly at the almost boyish gaiety which he evinced at times. There were moments when she had perforce to remind herself of the long years of loneliness and deprivation through which he had passed. They seemed to have left no mark on him. And yet she could not think they were forgotten, for once--it was at her second visit to him--he spoke at some length of his illness. Not, however, with any bitterness or annoyance, but merely as one might mention a curious experience through which one had lived, and for which one was little or none the worse.