A young girl sat in a dainty room, writing at a quaint old escritoire, lit by candles in shining brass sconces.  She had a sweet blonde face, but more character in it than usually falls to the lot of the English girl.  There was experience in the sensitive refinement of her features, a silver touch of suffering:  not wasting experience or bitter suffering, but just enough to refine—­she had waited.  But she had been bravely happy all the time.

Pretty books filled a shelf above her escritoire, and between the candlesticks was a photograph in a filigree silver frame.  Towards this she looked every now and then, in the pauses of her writing, with a happy, trustful expression of quiet love.  During one pause she noticed that her little clock pointed to 8.30.  ‘Jim will just be going on,’ she said to herself.  Yes, that photograph was ‘Jim.’

A quaint little face it was, full of sweet wrinkles, and yet but a boy’s face.  The wrinkles, you could see, were but so many threads of gold which happy laughter had left there.  Siss called him her Punchinello, likewise her poet, for Jim is a poet who makes his poetry of his own bright face and body, acts it night after night to an audience, and the people laugh and cry as he plays, for his face is like a bubbling spring, full of laughing eddies on the surface, but ever so deep with sweet freshness beneath—­and some catch sight of the deeps.  The world knows him as a comedian.  Siss knows him as a poet, and because she knows what loving tender tears are in him as well as laughter, she calls him her Punchinello.

This is what she was writing:  ’How near our home seems now, Jimmie boy!  Every night as you go on—­and you are just going on now—­I feel our home draw nearer:  and, do you know, all this week our star has seemed to grow brighter and brighter.  Can you see it in London?  It comes out here about six o’clock—­first very pale, like a dream, and then fuller and fuller and warmer and warmer.  Sometimes I say that it is the sovereigns we are putting into the bank that make it so much brighter; and I am sure it was brighter after that last ten pounds....  You are laughing at me, aren’t you?  Never mind; you can be just as silly.  Dear, dear, funny little face!’

I had reached just so far in my dream when the oysters came, and that is why I wished I had ordered ‘Anglos’ and no roll.

When I looked again, Siss had stopped writing, and was sitting with her head in her hands dreaming.  I looked into her eyes, felt ashamed for a moment, and then stepped into her dream.  I felt I was not worthy to walk there, but I took off my hat and told myself that I was reverent.

It was a pretty flat, full of dainty rooms, and I followed her from one to another, and one there was just like that in which I had seen her writing, with the old escritoire, and the books, and the burning candles, and the silver photograph shrine.  She walked about very wistfully, and her eyes were full.  So were mine, and I wanted to sob, but feared lest she should hear.  Presently Jim joined her, and they walked together, and said to each other, ’Think, this is our home at last’—­’Think, this is our home at last.  O love, our home—­together for evermore!’