“Only the cushions.  I stuffed a lot with one of mother’s feather beds.  She left me everything, you know.”

“Yes.  You didn’t say much about it.”

“No.  The flowers are nice, aren’t they?  I love flowers.”

“So you do,” he exclaimed suddenly.  “I wish I’d brought you some; there are such lovely ones at Victoria.”

His wife smiled.

“But I’ve brought you something I hope you’ll like as well.”

“Have you, you dear kind person?”

He took her hand and drew nearer.  “Marie, darling, it’s awf’ly good to see you again.  This last week in Paris seemed such waste of time, with you so near.”

She looked at him with her eyes widening, a trick he found vivid in his memory.  A little more colour rose into her cheeks.

“Don’t you want to see the children?” she asked, “or do you want tea first?”

“I have an idea I want you.  But—­where are they?”

“In the dining-room.  George will be back from school directly.”

“School?”

“Yes, school.”

“Things have been happening!” he exclaimed, getting up.  He pulled caressingly at the hand he held.  “You’re coming, too?”

“Go in and see them by yourself.  See if they remember you.  Dispense with my introductions.”

She laughed, pulling her hand from his, and he moved away.  At the door he looked back, puzzled.  An element which he was unprepared for, could not understand, seemed with them in the room.  She leaned back among the fat cushions, pretty and leisured as he had been used to seeing her before their marriage, only now she had something else about her which he could not define.  She was not looking at him, but down at her hands lying in her lap, and the curling sweep of her eyelashes, the bend of her head, the white nape of her neck, the colour and contour of her cheek—­all these he found newly adorable.  He almost came back, with a rush of tenderness, longing for a real embrace, but something, that element which he only sensed, restrained him.

He went into the dining-room, where a four-year-old girl nursed a doll and played with a robust baby by turns.  They were merry, healthy children, and their chubby prettiness swelled his heart with pride.  These were his; he had fathered them.  And just through that partitioning wall was a woman who was all his, too; one of the prettiest of women, and his wife.

“Hallo, kids!” he smiled at them from the door-way, “here’s Daddy come back.  Come and see if you remember him.  What a great girl Minna’s grown, and is that the baby Dadda left behind him?”

He picked up the baby and danced and dandled her, but the four-year-old Minna came more sagely, more slowly; she had to be won over by bribe and strategy, and her aloofness made him a trifle sore.  In a moment or two he heard the maid go down the corridor and let in a boisterous boy, who ran into the dining-room swinging a satchel of books and pulled up short at seeing the stranger among them.