midday
He watched her , critically and provisionally , while with comfortable , motherly , half-suppressed chest-sounds , and a round eye cocked for finds among the dirt , remarkably altogether the appearance of a pensive white hen , she made believe to scratch up the earth with her feet . A rather sympathetic performance , he allowed , her imitation of the hen , calling up before one the vision of a farmyard , a brood of downy yellow chicks , a duckpond , sunshine , green things . He let her do it as long as she would , or rather until to vary the thing she increased the comic beyond the line he fixed . When midday found him grudgingly laughing at her cackling , it seemed improbable certainly that midnight had seen him sleeping in her arms . But underlying their laughter was a consciousness in each that day of a thing uniting them which had not been there before . * * * * * Sitting bolstered up in bed to eat his first real meal , he looked , with his long hair parted in the middle and brushed down over his hollow temples , like one of those old masters in the Ewe-fitsy , Aurora told him . A St. John the Baptist , she specified .