Darcy the vigor and health which his weeks of fever had filched from
him, and as his normal activity and higher pressure of vitality
returned, he seemed to himself to fall even more under the spell which
the miracle of Frank's youth cast over him. Twenty times a day he found
himself saying to himself suddenly at the end of some ten minutes'
silent resistance to the absurdity of Frank's idea: "But it isn't
possible; it can't be possible," and from the fact of his having to
assure himself so frequently of this, he knew that he was struggling and
arguing with a conclusion which already had taken root in his mind. For
in any case a visible living miracle confronted him, since it was
equally impossible that this youth, this boy, trembling on the verge of
manhood, was thirty-five. Yet such was the fact.

July was ushered in by a couple of days of blustering and fretful rain,
and Darcy, unwilling to risk a chill, kept to the house. But to Frank
this weeping change of weather seemed to have no bearing on the behavior
of man, and he spent his days exactly as he did under the suns of June,
lying in his hammock, stretched on the dripping grass, or making huge
rambling excursions into the forest, the birds hopping from tree to tree
after him, to return in the evening, drenched and soaked, but with the
same unquenchable flame of joy burning within him.

"Catch cold?" he would ask, "I've forgotten how to do it, I think.
I suppose it makes one's body more sensible always to sleep out-of-doors.
People who live indoors always remind me of something peeled and
skinless."

"Do you mean to say you slept out-of-doors last night in that deluge?"
asked Darcy. "And where, may I ask?"