“I couldn’t sleep.  I was thinking of you and all the things you said last night.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t sleep.  I expect you were rather tired with travelling; over-tired, perhaps.”

“I was as fresh as paint when I got here yesterday and you know I was. You took it out of me.”

“We shan’t be able to argue about this every day; I couldn’t stand it, Osborn.”

“I’m ready to say that I daresay we men are thoughtless sort of brutes; but you didn’t marry one of the worst by a long chalk, you know.”

A smile twitched her lips, goading him to desperation.

“No,” she owned.  “There was nothing lurid about you.  But, heavens! it was dull!”

He took his hand off her shoulder and went to search for matches and pipe on the mantelpiece.  He noticed many little things acutely in his unhappiness; how nicely the silver vases were cleaned, and that the piperack was kept on the righthand side now instead of the left.

“You’ll come round.”

“If you knew how impossible it seems to me you wouldn’t say that.”

“I suppose I shall be worrying over this business all day as well as all night?”

“I hope not.  I’m lunching with you, at one, at the Royal Red.”

“What!  You’ll come to lunch?”

“You asked me.”

Pleasure, almost triumph, lit his face.  “I’ll give you a good time.  Sure you wouldn’t like some other place better than the Royal Red?”

“I’ve got, somehow, a special ache for it.”

“Then you must have what you want, of course.  I’ll get away punctually, so as not to keep you waiting.”

Marie accompanied him into the hall to help him on with his coat, and to remark that his muffler needed washing.  But she did not kiss him on parting; before he could ask mutely for the salute she was on her way back to the breakfast-table.

She sat there some while after he had gone, comfortably finishing her own meal, which had been interrupted by attendance on the children, as if deliberately determining that Osborn’s return should interfere in no whit with her recent ease.  Only when she was quite ready, with no hurry and at her own pleasure, did she start out to the Heath to give the children their morning airing.

“Mummie,” said Minna, “George said Daddy has promised to bring us some toys.”

“That’s very kind of Daddy, isn’t it?”

She walked thoughtfully.  “Things have changed,” she said to herself, “I suppose money has changed them.  It always can.”  She thought this with a certain enjoyment, yet down underneath, where that stony organ which used to be her heart lay, she knew that she wanted, more than thousands and thousands of pounds, the light and life of that first year over again.  What joy was like the birth of such love?  Or what regret like the death of it?

Their walk on the Heath lasted till eleven o’clock, when she returned to put the children under the charge of the maid.  She was meticulous in her instructions for their care and requirements, almost passionate in her loving good-byes to them.  Truly no one, she thought again, as their arms clung about her neck, could know all that they had been to her, how heavenly kind they were.