Peacey or Roger, be so queer in climate?  This time it was Richard’s fault.  She had been willing to be lightly, facilely happy over it like other people.  Her spirit snarled at him, and she cried out impatiently, “Go and eat your eggs before they’re cold.”  As Richard took his seat, moving slowly and trancedly, and began to eat his food with half indifference because of his dreams, she took the chair at the other end of the table, and, cupping her chin in her hands, stared at him petulantly.

“Why didn’t you tell me in your letters how beautiful she was?” she demanded.

He answered mildly, “Didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t,” she told him curtly.  “You said you thought her pretty.  Thought her pretty, indeed, with that hair and that wonderful Scotch little face!...”

She caught her breath in irritation at the expression on his face, the uneasy movement from side to side of his eyes which warred with the smile on his lips.  Why, when he thought of his love, need he have an air as if he listened to two voices and was distressed by the effort to follow their diverse musics?  But she could not quarrel with him for long, for he was wearing the drenched and glittering look which was given him by triumph or hard physical exercise and which always overcame her heart like the advance of an army.  His flesh and hair seemed to reflect the light as if they were wet, but neither with sweat nor with water.  Rather was it as if he were newly risen from a brave dive into some pool of vitality whose whereabouts were the secret that made his mouth vigilant.  Even he had the dazed, victorious look of a risen diver.  Utterly melted, she cried out, “I am so glad you have come home.”

He started, and came smiling out of his dream.  “I am so glad to be here,” he said.  They laughed across the table; the strong light showed them the dear lines they knew on one another’s faces.  “That’s why,” he cried brilliantly, “I’ve come at this ungodly hour.  I had to be here.  I got into London at nine o’clock and I went and had some dinner at the Station Hotel.  But I felt wretched.  Mother, I’m getting,” he announced with a naive triumph, “awfully domestic.  I got the hump the minute Ellen left Edinburgh.  I felt I must come down to you at once, so I went and got the cycle and started off straight away, and I would have been here by midnight if I hadn’t had a smash at Upminster.  No, I wasn’t hurt.  Not a scrap.  It was at the beginning of that garden suburb.  God, it must be beastly living in those new houses; like beginning to colour a pipe.  I’m glad we live in this old place.  Well, a chap who’d bought some timber at an auction down in Surrey, and was taking it home to Laindon, dropped a log off his lorry, and I smashed into it and burst a tyre and broke half a dozen spokes in my front wheel, so I had to hunt round till I found a garage, and when I did I had to spend hours tinkering the machine up.  The man who owned the place came