“Oh, Jim—­Jim!” Julia rested her cheek against his, “I have needed you so!”

Jim tightened an arm about her.

“I adore you,” he said simply, unashamed of his wet eyes.  “Do you love me?” To this Julia made no answer but a long sigh of utter content.

“Do you?” repeated Jim, after an interval.

“Does this look as if I did?” Julia murmured, not moving.

Silence again, and then Jim said, with a great sigh: 

“Oh, Petty, what a long, long time!”

“Thank God it’s over!” said Julia softly.

“What made you do it, dear?” Jim asked presently, in the course of a long rambling talk.  At that Julia did straighten up, so that her eyes might meet his.

“Just seeing you—­pray about it, Jim,” she said, her eyes filling again, although her lips were smiling.  “I thought that, this time, we would both pray, and that—­even if there are troubles, Jim—­ we’d remember that hour in St. Charles’s, and think how we longed for each other!”

And resting her cheek against his, Julia began to cry with joy, and Jim clung to her, his own eyes brimming, and they were very happy.

CHAPTER IX

September daylight, watery and uncertain, and very different from the golden purity of California’s September sunshine, fell in pale oblongs upon the polished floor of a certain London drawing-room, and battled with the dancing radiance of a coal fire that sent cheering gleams and flashes of gold into the duskiest corners of the room.

It was a beautiful room, and a part of a beautiful house, for the American doctor and his wife, deciding to make the English capital their home, had searched and waited patiently until in Camden Hill Road they had discovered a house possessed of just the irresistible combination of bigness and coziness, beauty and simplicity, for which they had hoped.  In the soft tones of the rugs, the plain and comfortable chairs, the warm glow of a lamp shade, or the gleam of a leather-bound book, there was at once a suggestion of discrimination and of informal ease.  And informal yet strangely exhilarating the friends of Doctor and Mrs. Studdiford found it.  Very famous folk liked to sit in these deep chairs, and talk on and on beside this friendly fire, while London slept, and the big clock in the hall turned night into morning.  No hosts in London were more popular than the big, genial doctor, and his clever, silent, and most beautiful wife.  Mrs. Studdiford was an essentially genuine person; the flowers in her drawing-room, like the fruit on her table, were sure to be sensibly in season; her clothes and her children’s clothes were extraordinarily simple, and her new English friends, simple and domestic as they were, whatever their rank, found her to be one of themselves in these things, and took her to their hearts.