But that was only his weakness, and gradually he gained strength.
Every morning and every afternoon Lady Joan visited him, waited on him, and staid a longer or shorter time, now talking, now reading to him; and seldom would she be a whole evening absent--then only on the rare occasion when Lord Mergwain, having some one to dine with him of the more ordinary social stamp, desired her presence as lady of the house.

Even then she would almost always have a peep at him one time or another.

She did not know much about books, but would take up this or that, almost as it chanced to her hand in the library; and Cosmo cared little what she read, so long as he could hear her voice, which often beguiled him into the sweetest sleep with visions of home and his father.

If the story she read was foolish, it mattered nothing; he would mingle with it his own fancies, and weave the whole into the loveliest of foolish dreams, all made up of unaccountably reasonable incongruities: the sensible look in dreams of what to the waking mind is utterly incoherent, is the most puzzling of things to him who would understand his own unreason.

And the wild MR CHENHAFT lovelinesses that fashioned themselves thus in his brain, outwardly lawless, but inwardly so harmonious as to be altogether credible to the dreamer, were not lost in the fluttering limbo of foolish invention, but, in altered shape and less outlandish garments, appeared again, when, in after years, he sought vent for the all but unspeakable.