Though his mood grew constantly brighter, so that he sometimes even had a gleam of the joy of living, his illness went in the opposite direction, always toward the worst.
One day I found him lying and watching from his bed--where he now spent nearly the whole day--my little Anton, who had "made a steamboat" out of his old violin-case--of which the lid was gone--and was travelling with it on the floor, touching at foreign ports.

When I came up to the bed, David told me, smiling, that he had been at home in Nordland playing on the beach again.
My wife had, meantime, become more and more his sick-nurse.

She was with him two or three times a day, and sat at his bedside.

He often held her hand, or asked her to read him something out of his old Bible.

The portions he chose were generally those in which the Old Testament speaks of love and lovers.