“Yes!  Isn’t it nice?” I returned, smiling at him.

“Ripping!” Dicky agreed enthusiastically.  Then, reflectively, “Funniest thing about it is the way I cotton to this domestic stunt.  If anyone had told me before I met you that I should ever stand for this husband-reading-to-knitting-wife sort of thing I should have bought him a ticket to Matteawan, pronto.”

He stopped and frowned heavily at me, in mimic disapproval.

“Picture all spoiled,” he declared, sighing.  “You are not knitting.  Why, oh, why are you not knitting?”

“Because I never shall knit,” I returned, laughing, “at least not in the evening while you are reading.  That sort of thing never did appeal to me.  Either the wife who has to knit or sew or darn in the evening is too inefficient to get all her work done in daylight, or she has too much work to do.  In the first case, her husband ought to teach her efficiency; in the second place, he ought to help do the sewing or the darning.  Then they could both read.”

“Listen to the feminist?” carolled Dicky; then with mock severity:  “Of course, I am to infer, madam, that my stockings are all properly darned?”

“Your inference is eminently correct,” demurely.  “Your mother darned them today.”

What I had told him was true.  His mother had seen me looking over the stockings after they were washed, and had insisted on darning Dicky’s.  I saw that she longed to do some little personal service for her boy, and willingly handed them over.

Dicky threw back his head and laughed heartily.  Then his face sobered, and he came round to my side of the table and sat down on the arm of my chair.

“Speaking of mother,” he said, rumpling my hair caressingly, “I want to tell you, sweetheart, that you’ve made an awful hit with me the way you’ve taken care of her.  Nobody knows better than I how trying she can be, and you’ve been just as sweet and kind to her as if she were the most tractable person on earth.”

He put his arms around me and bent his face to mine.

“Pretty nice and comfy this being married to each other, isn’t it?”

“Very nice, indeed,” I agreed, nestling closer to him.

My heart echoed the words.  In fact, it seemed almost too good to be true, this quiet domestic cove into which our marital bark had drifted.  The storms we had weathered seemed far past.  Dicky’s jealousy of my brother-cousin, Jack Bickett; my unhappiness over Lillian Underwood—­those tempestuous days surely were years ago instead of months.

Now Jack was “somewhere in France,” and I had a queer little premonition that somewhere, somehow, his path would cross that of Miss Sonnot, the little nurse, who had gone with Dr. Braithwaite’s, expedition, and who for years had cherished a romantic ideal of my brother-cousin, although she had never met him.