He scribbled on in the stuffy untidy room, beside his tumbled bed, the flies banging against the windowpane, the bar of hot sunlight wheeling slowly across the wall, scribbled on oblivious of time and place, of his wholesome morning hunger, of the fact that he was in a strange household where his nonappearance might be inconvenient or perplexing. Words for one poem, then for the other, continued to surge up, mingling, confused and exciting, in his half-awakened brain. Sometimes he lingered on one for the sake of its own beauty, and suddenly a new poem would bud from it, as if the word had been a seed plunged into the heated atmosphere of his imagination. Disconnected, unmeaning, alluring, they strung themselves out on one bit of paper after another, till he threw down his pen and buried his rumpled head in his hands.

Through his dream he heard a knock, and started up. It was Mrs. Tracy coming in with a cup of coffee. He mustn't mind about having slept so long, she told him at once—it was the best thing for him, after his illness and the long journey. "Sleep is the young people's best doctor," she said with one of her sad smiles. "But you didn't eat much last night, and you'd better drink this coffee right off, while it's hot. It won't keep you from wanting your dinner by and by, I hope." She put the tray down beside him while he stammered his excuses, and went on, in the same friendly tone, with a glance at the litter of paper at his elbow: "If you've got any work to get through, I guess you'll be cooler down on the back porch than here; there's a little breeze from the river. We always get one of these heat waves in June."

Vance thanked her, and said he would come down at once, and she added, designating the lilac blossom in his coat: "But I see you've been down already, haven't you? You're like me—you love lilacs."

"Then it wasn't she who brought it," he thought; and answered, colouring, that, yes, he thought they had the best smell of any flower he knew, but he hadn't been down yet, and he guessed Upton must have brought the flower in while he was sleeping.

Mrs. Tracy, he thought, coloured a little too; there was a hint of surprise in her eyes. "Why, maybe he did," she acquiesced; and slid away on her soft soles, leaving him to his belated coffee.

The day passed uneventfully. In spite of his long sleep Vance still felt the weariness of convalescence, and the excitement of his changed surroundings. Disappointment also, the feeling that he was somehow being cheated out of hoped-for experiences, oppressed his tired nerves and left him for the moment without initiative, so that after dinner he was glad to accept Mrs. Tracy's suggestion that he should return to the back porch and stretch out in the hammock.