patients in the ward, but she had no inclination to know who they were or what they looked like; she had no desire to communicate with the outside world, nor any anxiety about the future. She could not imagine that she should ever wish to do anything except lie here watching the nuns at their work like birds in the cool deeps of a forest. When the doctor visited her and spoke cheerfully, she wondered vaguely how he managed to keep his very long black beard so frizzy, but she was not sufficiently interested to ask him. To his questions about her bodily welfare she let her tired body answer automatically, and often, when the doctor was bending over to listen to her heart or lungs, her spirit would have mounted up to float upon the shadows of sunlight rippling over the ceiling, that he and her body might commune without disturbing herself. At last there came a morning when the body grew impatient at being left behind and when it trembled with a faint desire to follow the spirit. Sylvia raised herself up on her elbow and asked a nun to bring her a looking-glass.

"But all my hair has been cut!" she exclaimed. She looked at her eyes: there was not much life in them, yet they were larger than she had ever seen them, and she liked them better than before, because they were now very kind eyes: this new Sylvia appealed to her.

She put the glass down and asked if she had been very ill.

"Very ill indeed," said the nun.

Sylvia longed to tell the nun that she must not believe all she had said when she was delirious: and then she wondered what she had said.

"Was I very violent in my delirium?" she asked.

The nun smiled.

"I thought I was in hell," said Sylvia, seriously. "When are my friends coming to see me?"

The nun looked grave.

"Your friends have all gone away," she said at last. "They used to come every day to inquire after you, but they went away when war was declared."

"War?" Sylvia repeated. "Did you say war?"

The nun nodded.

"War?" she went on. "This isn't part of my delirium? You're not teasing me? War between whom?"

"Russia, France, and England are at war with Germany and Austria."

"Then Carrier has left Petersburg?"

"Hush," said the nun. "It's no longer Petersburg. It's Petrograd now."

"But I don't understand. Do you mean to tell me that everybody has changed his name? I've changed my name back to my real name. My name is Sylvia Snow now. I changed it when I was delirious, but I shall always be Sylvia Snow. I've been thinking about it all these days while I've been lying so quiet. Did Carrier leave any message for me? He was the aviator, you know."

"He has gone back to fight for France," the nun said, crossing herself. "He was very sorry about your being so ill. You must pray for him."

"Yes, I will pray for him," Sylvia said. "And there is nobody left? Those two funny little English acrobats with fair curly hair. Have they gone?"

"They've gone, too," said the nun. "They came every day to inquire for you, and they brought you flowers, which were put beside your bed, but you were unconscious."

"I think I smelled a sweetness in the air sometimes," Sylvia said.

"They were always put outside the window at night," the nun explained.

The faintest flicker of an inclination to be amused at the nun's point of view about flowers came over Sylvia; but it scarcely endured for an instant, because it was so obviously the right point of view in this hospital, where even flowers, not to seem out of place, must acquire orderly habits. The nun asked her if she wanted anything and passed on down the ward when she shook her head.

Sylvia lay back to consider her situation and to pick up the threads of normal existence, which seemed so inextricably tangled at present that she felt like a princess in a fairy tale who had been set an impossible task by an envious witch.

In the first place, putting on one side all the extravagance of delirium, Sylvia was conscious of a change in her personality so profound and so violent, that now with the return of reason and with the impulse to renewed activity, she was convinced of her rightness in deciding to go back to her real name of Sylvia Snow. The anxiety that she had experienced during her delirium to make the change positively remained from that condition as something of value that bore no relation to the grosser terrors of hell she had experienced. The sense of regeneration that she was feeling at this moment could not entirely be explained by her mind's reaction to the peace of the hospital, in the absence of pain, and to her bodily well-being. She was able to set in its proportion each of these factors, and when she had done so there still remained this emotion that was indefinable unless she accepted for it the definition of regeneration.

"The fact is I've eaten rose leaves and I'm no longer a golden ass," she murmured. "But what I want to arrive at is when exactly I was turned into an ass and when I ate the rose leaves."

For a time her mind, unused since her fever to concentrated thinking, wandered off into the tale of Apuleius. She wished vaguely that she had the volume so inscribed by Michael Fane with her in Petersburg, but she had left it behind at Mulberry Cottage. It was some time before she brought herself back to the realization that the details of the Roman story had not the least bearing upon her meditation, and that the symbolism of the enchanted transformation and the recovery of human shape by eating rose leaves had been an essentially modern and romantic gloss upon the old author. This gloss, however, had served extraordinarily well to symbolize her state of mind before she had been ill, and she was not going to abandon it now.

"I must have had an experience once that fitted in with the idea, or it would not recur to me like this with such an imputation of significance."

Sylvia thought hard for a while; the nun on day duty was pecking away at a medicine-bottle, and the busy little noise competed with her thoughts, so that she was determined before the nun could achieve her purpose with the medicine-bottle to discover when she became a golden ass. Suddenly the answer flashed across her mind; at the same moment the nun triumphed over her bottle and the ward was absolutely still again.

"I became a golden ass when I married Philip and I ate the rose leaves when Arthur refused to marry me."

This solution of the problem, though she knew that it was not radically more satisfying than the defeat of a toy puzzle, was nevertheless wonderfully comforting, so comforting that she fell asleep and woke up late in the afternoon, refreshingly alert and eager to resume her unraveling of the tangled skein.

"I became a golden ass when I married Philip," she repeated to herself.

For a while she tried to reconstruct the motives that fourteen years ago had induced her toward that step. If she had really begun her life all over again, it should be easy to do this. But the more she pondered herself at the age of seventeen the more impossibly remote that Sylvia seemed. Certain results, however, could even at this distance of time be ascribed to that unfortunate marriage: among others the three months after she left Philip. When Sylvia came to survey all her life since, she saw how those three months had lurked at the back of everything, how really they had spoiled everything.

"Have I fallen a prey to remorse?" she asked herself. "Must I forever be haunted by the memory of what was, after all, a necessary incident to my assumption of assishness? Did I not pay for them that day at Mulberry Cottage when I could not be myself to Michael, but could only bray at him the unrealities of my outward shape?"

Lying here in the cool hospital, Sylvia began to conjure against her will the incidents of those three fatal months, and so weak was she still from the typhus that she could not shake off their obsession. Her mind clutched at