“Look here, this is the room I meant.”  They had climbed to the top of the little brown house, and Flossie had hardly condescended to glance through the doors he had opened on their way.  He opened one now at the head of the stairs, and this time she looked in.

“It would make all the difference to me, Floss,” he said humbly, “if I had a place like this when I want to get away to write.”

“When you want to get away from me, you mean.”  Her lips shook; she looked round her with angry eyes, as if jealous of the place, and all that he meant to do in it.

It was a large room, with a wide window looking on to the garden and away across meadows and cornfields to Harrow Hill with its thin church spire.  The window was guarded with iron bars.  The wall-paper was designed in little circles; and in each circle there were figures of little boys and girls, absurd and gay.  So many hundreds of little figures, and so absurd and gay, that to sit in that room surrounded by them, to look at them and endeavour to count them, was to go mad.  But those figures fascinated Flossie.

“Oh, Lord, what a beastly wall-paper,” said he.

“I think it’s sweet,” said she.  And though she wasn’t going to let him have the house, she was ready to quarrel with him again about the wall-paper.  And then, in the corner by the window they came upon a child’s toy, a little wooden horse, broken.  He pointed it out to her, half-smiling.  “Some kiddy must have left that there.”

“Of course,” said she, “it’s been a nursery.  And, I say, Keith, I think it must have died.”

“How do you make that out?”

“It couldn’t have been long here.  Don’t you see, the wall-paper’s all new.” (He thought that was rather sharp of her, the practical Beaver!) “And yet,” she said continuing her train of induction; “it couldn’t.  If it had, they’d never have left that here.”

Ah, that was not sharp; it was something better.  There was, after all, about his Beaver a certain poetry and tenderness.

She picked up the little wooden horse, and held it in her hands, and adjusted its loosened mane, and mended its broken legs, fitting the edges delicately with her clever fingers.  And it seemed to him that as she bent over the toy her face grew soft again.  When she lifted her head her eyes rested on him, but without seeing him.  Never had Flossie had so poignant a vision of Muriel Maud.

He looked at her with a new wonder in his heart.  For the first time he was made aware of the change that two years had worked in her.  She had grown, he thought, finer in growing firmer; her body in its maturity was acquiring a strength and richness that had been wanting in its youth; as if through that time of waiting it were being fashioned for the end it waited for.  But that was not all.  She had clothed herself unconsciously with poetry.  She stood for a moment transfigured before him; a woman with sweet eyes beholding her desired destiny from far.  Her soul (for a moment) rose in her face like a star—­a dim prophetic star that trembled between darkness and dawn.  He knew that she saw herself now as the possible mother of his children.