It is a critical moment.  A brutal and licentious soldiery are not responsible at such moments.  They may carry sack and rapine to unheard of extremities.

“You young barbarians, be careful of your only mother—­unless you have a stock of them!” calls a voice from the top of the stairs which lead to the study.

“Father’s come out—­hurrah!  Come on, Allan!” shouts Field-Marshal Winifred the younger who is leader and commander, to her army whose tottery and chubby youth does not suggest the desperation of a forlorn hope.  So the study is carried at the point of the lath, and the banner of the victors—­a cross of a sort unknown to heraldry, marked on a white ground with a blue pencil—­is planted on the sacred desk itself.

Winsome the matron comes more slowly up the stairs.

“Can common, uninspired people come in?” she says, pausing at the top.

She looks about with a motherly eye, and pulls down the blind of the window into which the sun has been streaming all the morning.  It is one of the advantages of such a wife that her husband, especially the rare literary variety, may be treated as no more than the eldest but most helpless of the babes.  It is also true that Ralph had pulled up the blind in order that he might the better be able to see his wife moving among the reapers.  For Winsome was more than ever a woman of affairs.

She stood in the doorway, looking in spite of the autumn sun and the walk up from the corn-field, deliriously cool.  She fanned herself with a broad rhubarb-leaf—­an impromptu fan plucked by the way.  She sat down on the ledge of the upper step of Ralph’s study, as she often did when she worked or rested.  Ralph was again within, reclining on a window-seat, while the pack of reckless banditti swarmed over him.

“Have the rhymes been behaving themselves this morning?” Winsome said, looking across at Ralph as only a wife of some years’ standing can look at her husband—­with love deepened into understanding, and tempered with a spice of amusement and a wide and generous tolerance—­the look of a loving woman to whom her husband and her husband’s ways are better than a stage play.  Such a look is a certificate of happy home and an ideal life, far more than all heroics.  The love of the after-years depends chiefly on the capacity of a wife to be amused by her husband’s peculiarities—­and not to let him see it.

“There are three blanks,” said Ralph, a little wistfully.  “I have written a good deal, but I dare not read it over, lest it should be nothing worth.”

This was a well-marked stage in Ralph’s composition, and it was well that his wife had come.

“I fear you have been dreaming, instead of working,” she said, looking at him with a kind of pitying admiration.  Ralph, too, had grown handsomer, so his wife thought, since she had him to look after.  How, indeed, could it be otherwise?

She rose and went towards him.