amusement—or it may express that deep sens{55}e of the humour which lies at the bottom of most earthly transactions, which is possible only to very rare spirits. Gazing at Kate with his eyes full of romance, he could not tell which it was, but felt it most probable that it was the latter, the depths being more natural to him than the shallows. “I don’t wonder that you laugh,” he added, after a pause, in the grave way which was so quaint to Kate. “It is like a thing that happened in a dream.”
{55}
At this strange comment she looked up at him, puzzled in her turn. Did he mean something? or was he laughing as she had been? But there was no laugh on John’s face; and suddenly it occurred to her that the eyes with which he was looking at her were those same eyes which she had seen, as in a vision, at the foot of the sofa, on the day of her accident. They were full of wonder, and anxiety, and alarm then; they were only serious and perplexed, and anxious to understand her now: but yet they were the same eyes; and the whole scene flashed back upon Kate’s impatient mind, and changed her mood in a moment. A sudden cloud, almost like that which comes over a child’s f{56}ace when it is about to cry, enveloped her. “Ah!” she cried, suddenly, “I remember you now. I remember your eyes!”
{56}
“My eyes!” cried John, growing scarlet with amazement.
“Yes, your eyes. The day it all happened, you know—though I am sure I don’t know even now what did happen. When I came to myself, I suppose—the first thing I was conscious of was a pair of eyes looking at me. They had no body to them,” said Kate, with a sudden moisture coming into her own—“they looked so anxious, so unhappy, about me. I see now it was you. How awfully good of you to care!”
“Good of me!” said John, feeling this sudden praise steal all over him with a melting weakening softness of delight. “I was very anxious, and very much alarmed. I think—they thought—you would never come to yourself.”
“Was it so long?” said Kate, with that intense wistful interest{57} which youth feels in itself.
{57}
“It was long to us—please don’t speak of it; it felt like an age,” said John, with a shudder. He turned half away from her in the pain of the recollection, and then turned back to find those moist surprised child eyes of hers fixed upon him with an incipient tear in each of them, and a look of—what was it?—tenderness, gratitude,
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