“Give me a kiss for it,” he said, drawing her down.

She kissed him lightly.

“Fancy you the mother of a family!” he remarked, with a look at the screened corner.

She smiled to herself, and began fingering the other things.  “How nice they are!  And silk stockings!  They’re always welcome.”

“But you’re wearing them already,” he said, with rather a disappointed glance at her ankles.

“That doesn’t matter.  If there’s one thing you can’t glut a woman with, it’s silk stockings.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Kerr!  I’ll remember that when I come home in the small hours and have to provide a peace offering.”

“Come home any time you like,” she said goodhumouredly, “there will always be peace as far as I am concerned.”

When he had entered the room, he had missed something in it; and now it occurred to him what it was.

“Where’s my bed?” he demanded.

“In the dressing-room.  I had it moved there, when you went; I thought I might as well give myself more space.”

“Of course!  I noticed something unusual about the dressing-room.  You waited for me to move it back here, I suppose?  It’s rather a tough job for women.”

“The hall-porter would have done it, you know.”

“Never mind, pet.  I’ll do it ever so quietly after dinner.”

She did not reply.

“Are you ready?” he asked.  “Come back to the fire, and sit down.  There’s so much to tell each other about, isn’t there?”

She moved to the door acquiescently and switched out the light, he following.  A savoury smell crept through the chinks of the kitchen door, with the all-pervasiveness of cookery in flats.  He sniffed it.

“How familiar!  But you don’t do the cooking now?”

“No; I only help, sometimes.  Ann’s a treasure.”

“What do we pay her?”

“Thirty pounds a year.”

“Whew!”

She cast a sidelong glance at him.  “A domestic drudge is worth it, I assure you; women have been consistently underrated.”

“But fool work like cleaning saucepans and helping with the kids—­”

“Shutting oneself up with the sink; working early; working late; breathing ashes and dust and grease; keeping tolerably civil and cheerful over it ... that’s the job we’re speaking of.  I ought to know all about it,” she said in a low voice, as if to herself.

She sat in her corner of the chesterfield and took up her knitting.  He sat down, too, by her, all at once alert, surveying the flying movements of her dear hands; hands as tender and white as ever he remembered them.

“Oh come!” he said in affectionate but uneasy remonstrance, “you don’t look much as if you’d been shut up with the sink, working early and working late.”

“You forget I’ve had a whole year’s holiday.”  She kept her eyes on her work, as if re-casting that first year upon her busy needles.  “At least,” she reflected, almost as if to herself, “part of the time was only half-holiday; but the last six months have been wonderful.”