“Is this really Julia Winter?”

Already the homelike quality of her home had vanished; the dear possession of her things had become less dear.  She could think of another home, a bigger one, and a hearthplace with her husband’s face opposite her own.  She sat down by the dressing-table, and laid her hands idly in her lap, and thought all the rosy things that women in love do think.

She lunched the next day with Desmond as a matter of course.  He called for her at her office, and drove her away possessively.  There was no more solitude for her, no more proud loneliness, no more boastful independence.  Already she clung and already she enjoyed it.  When, over the table, he asked:  “Isn’t it nice being engaged?” she nodded, smiling, and answered:  “I’m wondering why I haven’t done it before.”

CHAPTER XX

SEPARATION

In November Marie had the letter which announced Osborn’s imminent return.

“...  In another week,” he wrote, “I shall be with you all again.  It will be good to see you.  Of course, this has been rather a rag, and I think I shall hold down the job for ever and evermore; but a year is a long time, isn’t it?  I look forward to coming home.  I shall have a lot to tell you, but I expect I shall want to hear your news first, and how George has got on at school, and so on.”

The letter had an unwonted postscript:  “I wonder if you’ve missed me, old girl.”

It was waiting for Marie on a grey afternoon when she returned from a lecture, for which, a year ago, she would have needed a dictionary, but which now entered her brain glibly and was at home there.  All that afternoon she had been listening to an exotic discourse on “Woman and her Current Philosophy”; and now—­here was Osborn’s letter, suggesting calmly, proprietorially almost, his re-entry into her life.  Was it possible that he had been away for a whole year?  Or possible that he had been away for only a year?  Rapid as the stride of Time had been, he was already a stranger, someone dimly perceived, arriving from another life, and hardly making his presence felt.

She stood reading the letter attentively, noting its points and phrases with even detachment; its arrival arrested her thoughts, although she had known it must come soon.  Its sender was already on his way to her, expecting the eager welcome of home; and home had nothing but stereotyped compliments to offer.  Who was he, anyway?

Just the man who had made the domestic laws in No. 30, had made them disagreeably and could make them no longer, whose power was broken.  The keeper of the purse; the winder of the clocks of life; the hostile element in a peaceful day; the shade of a dead lover long since trampled under the domestic battle-ground.

It was almost curious that he had ever existed.

She came for the second time to the postscript and smiled vaguely and faintly.  He wondered if she had missed him.