Continental Monthly The , page 129 by Various Authors
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s necessity for inaction--he was anything but a resigned man. Captain George, getting his furlough and carrying him off, was blessed from the deepest heart of the ward nurses. He had a kind of feeling that this his first illness was a matter in which the universe should be concerned, and with that fretful self-exaggeration came that other unutterable yearning that attends the first proof that we are coheirs with others to the ills flesh is heir to, weary homesickness and childish desire for sympathy.
So now, weakened physically with that strange new heartsickness, paralyzing his will and giving freer scope to is feverish impatience, George's careless words had rolled away the stone from the sepulchre, and its prisoners were free. Not dead, not having lost a shade of color from their wings, they nestled and gleamed through his heart, filling the summer day with just such intangible perfect witchery as those other days had been full of. Perhaps, too, time and absence had heightened the charm. Imagination has such a way of catching up little scenes and words and looks, and, without altering one of the facts, haloing them with such a golden deceptive atmosphere, adding, day by day, faintest touches, that they grow by and by into a something wholly different. So that fortnight came back to him, an illuminated poem, along rich strains of music, making every nerve thrill with the pleasure-pain of its associations.
And by degrees, as the tide of sensation, thinned itself, lying back with closed eyes, while the long train swept on through the torrid day, separate pictures came before his inner sight. Just as keen and clear were they as when they first fell on his vision. He had not blurred nor dimmed their outlines with frequent recalling and suggestions of difference.
A narrow strip of gray sand, ribbed with the wave wash to the very foot of the reddish brown bowlders that bounded it. Standing thereon a slender woman's figure, clad in quiet gray. The face was turned toward him--a dark, unflushe