“No,” he agreed rather vaguely, “of course I didn’t know.”  He thought she meant that he had not known how long the parting would seem, how insistent would be the need of each other.  “I should not have gone, if I had known,” he added, tenderly.

“I knew you wouldn’t, Ronnie.  But—­I was all right.”

“Of course you were all right.  You know, you said we were a healthy couple, so I suppose there was no need to worry or to expect anything else.  Was there?  All the same I did worry—­sometimes.”

She waited for more.

It did not come.  Ronnie was kissing her hair again.

“Were you glad when you had my letter, Ronnie?” she asked, very low.

“Which letter, sweet?  I was always glad of every letter.”

“Why, the last—­the one to Leipzig.”

“Ah, of course!  Yes, I was very glad.  I read it in your cousin’s flat.  I had just been showing him—­oh, Helen!  That reminds me—­darling, I have something to show you!  Such a jolly treasure—­such a surprise!  I left it in the hall.  Would you like me to fetch it?”

He loosed his arms and she withdrew from them, looking up into his glowing face.

“Yes, Ronnie,” she said.  “Why, certainly.  Do fetch it.”

He rushed off into the hall.  He fumbled eagerly with the buckles of the canvas bag.  It had never taken so long, to draw the precious Infant forth.

He held it up to the hall lights.  He wanted to make sure that it was really as brown and as beautiful as it had always seemed to him.

Yes, it was as richly brown as the darkest horse-chestnut you ever saw in a bursting bur!

He walked back into the sitting-room, carrying it proudly before him.

Helen had just lighted the spirit-lamp beneath the swinging kettle on the brass stand.  Her face was rather white again.

“Here it is, Helen,” he said.  “The most beautiful ’cello you ever saw!  It is one hundred and fifty years old.  It was made at Prague.  I paid a hundred and fifty pounds for it.”

Helen looked.

“That was a good deal to pay for a ’cello,” she said, yet conscious as she spoke that—­even as Peter on the Mount—­she had made the remark chiefly because she “wist not what to say.”

“Not a bit!” said Ronnie.  “A chap in the orchestra at the Hague, with a fine ’cello of his own, told me he had never in his life handled such a beauty.  He considered it a wonderful bargain.”

“It is a beauty,” said Helen, pouring hot water from the urn into the teapot, with a hand which trembled.

Ronnie wheeled a third chair up to the low tea-table, opposite his own particular seat, leaned his ’cello up against it, sat down, put his elbows on his knees, and glowed at it with enthusiasm.

“I knew you would say so, darling.  Ever since I bought it, after choosing your organ at Zimmermann’s, I have been thinking of the moment when I should show it to you; though an even greater moment is coming for us soon, Helen.”