She stood there at the bed holding a brass basin with water, in which from time to time Glaucus dipped a sponge and moistened the head of his patient.
Vinicius gazed and could not believe his eyes.

What he saw seemed a dream, or the pleasant vision brought by fever, and only after a long time could he whisper,--"Lygia!" The basin trembled in her hand at that sound, but she turned on him eyes full of sadness.
"Peace be with thee!" answered she, in a low voice.
She stood there with extended arms, her face full of pity and sorrow.
But he gazed, as if to fill his sight with her, so that after his lids were closed the picture might remain under them.

He looked at her face, paler and smaller than it had been, at the tresses of dark hair, at the poor dress of a laboring woman; he looked so intently that her snowy forehead began to grow rose-colored under the influence of his look.

And first he thought that he would love her always; and second, that that paleness of hers and that poverty were his work,--that it was he who had driven her from a house where she was loved, and surrounded with plenty and comfort, and thrust her into that squalid room, and clothed her in that poor robe of dark wool.
He would have arrayed her in the costliest brocade, in all the jewels of the earth; hence astonishment, alarm, and pity seized him, and sorrow so great that he would have fallen at her feet had he been able to move.
"Lygia," said he, "thou didst not permit my death." "May God return health to thee," she answered, with sweetness.
For Vinicius, who had a feeling both of those wrongs which he had inflicted on her formerly, and those which he had wished to inflict on her recently, there was a real balsam in Lygia's words.

He forgot at the moment that through her mouth Christian teaching might speak; he felt only that a beloved woman was speaking, and that in her answer there was a special tenderness, a goodness simply preterhuman, which shook him to the depth of his soul.