Avery on her part was thoroughly weary, but she would not tell him so, and they spent the whole evening in wandering about house and gardens, discussing the advisability of various alterations and improvements.  In the end Piers awoke suddenly to the fact that she was looking utterly exhausted, and with swift compunction piloted her to her room.

“What a fool I am!” he declared.  “You must be dead beat.  Why didn’t you say you wanted to rest?”

“I didn’t, dear,” she answered simply.  “I wanted to be with you.”

He caught her hand to his lips.  “You are happy with me then?”

She uttered a little laugh that said more than words.  “My own boy, you give me all that the most exacting woman could possibly desire and then ask me that!”

He laughed too, his arm close about her.  “I would give you the world if I had it.  Avery, I hate to think we’ve come home—­that the honeymoon is over—­and the old beastly burdens waiting to be shouldered—­” He laid his forehead against her neck with a gesture that made her fancy he did not wish her to see his face for the moment.  “P’r’aps I’m a heartless brute, but I never missed the old chap all the time I was away,” he whispered.  “It’s like being dragged under the scourge again—­just when the old scars were beginning to heal—­to come back to this empty barrack.”

She slid a quick arm round his neck, all the woman’s heart in her responding to the cry from his.

“The place is full of him,” Piers went on; “I meet him at every corner.  I see him in his old place on the settle in the hall, where he used to wait for me, and—­and row me every night for being late.”  He gave a broken laugh.  “Avery, if it weren’t for you, I—­I believe I should shoot myself.”

“Come and sit down!” said Avery gently.  She drew him to a couch, and they sat down locked together.

During all the ten weeks of their absence he had scarcely even mentioned his grandfather.  He had been gay and inconsequent, or fiercely passionate in his devotion to her.  But of his loss he had never spoken, and vaguely she had known that he had shut it out of his life with that other grim shadow that dwelt behind the locked door she might not open.  She had not deemed him heartless, but she had regretted that deliberate shirking of his grief.  She had known that sooner or later he would have to endure the scourging of which he spoke and that it would not grow the lighter with postponement.

And now as she held him against her heart, she was in a sense relieved that it had come at last, thankful to be there with him while he stripped himself of all subterfuge and faced his sorrow.

He could not speak much as he sat there clasped in her arms.  One or two attempts he made, and then broke down against her breast.  But no words were needed.  Her arms were all he desired for consolation, and if they waked in him the old wild remorse, he stifled it ere it could take full possession.