“Let me look at my wife!” he says, taking my countenance in his tender hands, as if it were made of old china, and would break if he let it it fall.  “I feel as if I had never had a wife before, as if it were quite a new plaything.”

I make no verbal answer.  I am staring up with all my eyes into his face, thinking, with a sort of wonder, how much goodlier, younger, statelier it is than it has appeared to me in any of those dream-pictures, which yet mostly flatter.

“My wife! my wife!” he says, speaking the words most softly, as if they greatly pleased him, and replacing with carefullest fingers a stray and arrant lock that has wandered from its fellows into my left eye.  “What has come to you?  Had I forgotten what you were like?  How pretty you are!  How well you look!”

“Do I?” say I, with a pleasant simper; then, with a sudden and overwhelming recollection of the bilious gingery frock, and the tousled hair, “No, nonsense!” I say, uneasily, “impossible!  You are laughing at me!  Ah!”—­(with a sigh of irrepressible regret and back-handed pride)—­ “you should have seen me half an hour ago!  I did look nice then, if you like.”

“Why nicer than now?”—­(with a puzzled smile that both plays about his bearded lips and gayly shines in his steel-gray eyes).

“Oh, never mind! never mind!” reply I, in some confusion, “it is a long story; it is of no consequence, but I did.”

He does not press for an explanation, for which I am obliged to him.

“Nancy!” he says, with a sort of hesitating joy, a diffident triumph in his voice, “do you know, I believe you have kept your promise!  I believe, I really believe, that you are a little glad to see me!”

“Are you glad to see me, is more to the purpose?” return I, descending out of heaven with a pout, and returning to the small jealousies and acerbities of earth, and to the recollection of that yet unexplained alighting at Aninda’s gate.

“Am I?”

He seems to think that no asseverations, no strong adjectives or intensifying adverbs, no calling upon sun and moon and stars to bear witness to his gladness, can increase the force of those two tiny words, so he adds none.

“I wonder, then,” say I, in a rather sneaky and shamefaced manner, mumbling and looking down, “that you were not in a greater hurry to get to me?”

“In a greater hurry!” he repeats, in an accent of acute surprise.  “Why, child, what are you talking about?  Since we landed, I have neither slept nor eaten.  I drove straight across London, and have been in the train ever since.”

“But—­between—­this—­and the—­station?” suggest I, slowly, having taken hold of one of the buttons of his coat; the very one that in former difficulties I used always to resort to.