And he put his arm around me, and as we walked along together in the April night it was like the days when we had been young lovers, only our joy in each other was deeper and finer, for then we had only guessed at happiness, and now we knew—­

Well, I went up every day.  William Watters came for me, and I carried my patterns and we sat in the big west room, and right under the window a pair of robins were building a nest.

We watched them as they worked, and it seemed to us that no matter how hard we toiled those two birds kept ahead.  “I never dreamed,” Lady Crusoe remarked one morning, “that they were at it all the time like this.”

“You wait until they begin to feed their young,” I told her.  “People talk about being as free as a bird.  But I can tell you that they slave from dawn until dark.  I have seen a mother bird at dusk giving a last bite to one squalling baby while the father fed another.”

Lady Crusoe laid down her work and looked out over the hills.  “The father,” she said, and that was all for a long time, and we stitched and stitched, but at last she spoke straight from her thoughts:  “How dear your husband is to you!”

“That’s what husbands are made for.”

“Some of them are not, dear,” her voice was hard, “some of them expect so much and give so little—­”

I kept still and presently she began again.  “They give money—­and they think that is—­enough.  They give jewels—­and think we ought to be profoundly grateful.”

“Well, my experience,” I told her, “is that the men give as much love as the women—­”

She looked at me.  “What do you mean?”

“Love costs them a lot.”

“In what way?”

“They work for us.  Now there’s Billy’s grocery store.  If Billy didn’t have me, he’d be doing things that he likes better.  You wouldn’t believe it, but Billy wanted to study law, but it meant years of hard work before he could make a cent, and he and I would have wasted our youth in waiting—­and so he went into business—­and that’s a big thing for a man to do for a woman—­to give up a future that he has hoped for—­and that’s why I feel that I can’t do enough for Billy—­”

“I don’t see why you should look at it in that way,” she said, and her eyes were big and bright.  “Women are queens, and they honor men when they marry them—­”

“If women are queens,” I told her, “men are kings—­Billy honored me—­”

She smiled at me.  “Oh, you blessed dear—­” she said, and all of a sudden she came over and knelt beside me.  “What would you think of a man who married a woman whom the world called beautiful and brilliant, and whom—­whom princes wanted to marry—­And he was a very plain man, except that he had a lot of money—­millions and millions—­and after he married the woman whom he had said that he worshiped, he wanted to make just an every-day wife of her.  He wanted her to stay at home and look after his house.  He told her one night that it would be a great happiness for him if he could come in and find her warming—­his slippers.  And he said that his ideal of a woman was one who—­who—­held a child in her arms—­”