As she came towards her husband she motioned the hall porter to put the bags in the dressing-room. There was about her an assurance and authority, very quiet, but undeniable.

"Here you are, Osborn," she said.

"Hallo, dear!" he answered, rather stammeringly. "How are you? How are the--"

The maid took from him the overcoat which he was shedding, and his wife retreated into the sitting-room, he following.

When the door was shut, she turned, lifted her face, and murmured: "How are you, Osborn?"

He kissed her and, loth to relinquish her, kept his arm about her waist; she was unresponsive, but he did not notice that; they went together to the chesterfield drawn up before the fire and sat down.

She took a corner, turning herself to face him a little, so that he had to withdraw his arm from her, and she pushed a billowing cushion which he did not remember into a comfortable position for her back.

She spoke very kindly and sympathetically, but it was with the kindness and sympathy which someone who was a stranger might show.

"How well you look! I'm longing to hear all about your doings; your letters did not say very much. I should have met you at Victoria, only there's always a crush, and it's easy to miss people, so I thought I'd stay here."

"I didn't suppose you could leave the children to meet me."

"Oh, I can leave them quite well with Ann."

One of those silences which fall between people who have been estranged fell between them, during which he looked from her to the room, and all about him, and back to her, while she regarded him with that disinterested kindness.

"How nice everything looks!" he said, breaking the silence in a voice which sounded crude to himself. "What a lot of flowers you have, and all these cushions! I don't remember things, as a woman would do, but surely there's something new."

"Only the cushions. I stuffed a lot with one of mother's feather beds.

She left me everything, you know."

"Yes. You didn't say much about it."

"No. The flowers _are_ nice, aren't they? I love flowers."

"So you do," he exclaimed suddenly. "I wish I'd brought you some; there are such lovely ones at Victoria."

His wife smiled.

"But I've brought you something I hope you'll like as well."

"Have you, you dear kind person?"

He took her hand and drew nearer. "Marie, darling, it's awf'ly good to see you again. This last week in Paris seemed such waste of time, with you so near."

She looked at him with her eyes widening, a trick he found vivid in his memory. A little more colour rose into her cheeks.

"Don't you want to see the children?" she asked, "or do you want tea first?"

"I have an idea I want you. But--where are they?"

"In the dining-room. George will be back from school directly."

"School?"

"Yes, school."

"Things have been happening!" he exclaimed, getting up. He pulled caressingly at the hand he held. "You're coming, too?"

"Go in and see them by yourself. See if they remember you. Dispense with my introductions."

She laughed, pulling her hand from his, and he moved away. At the door he looked back, puzzled. An element which he was unprepared for, could not understand, seemed with them in the room. She leaned back among the fat cushions, pretty and leisured as he had been used to seeing her before their marriage, only now she had something else about her which he could not define. She was not looking at him, but down at her hands lying in her lap, and the curling sweep of her eyelashes, the bend of her head, the white nape of her neck, the colour and contour of her cheek--all these he found newly adorable. He almost came back, with a rush of tenderness, longing for a real embrace, but something, that element which he only sensed, restrained him.

He went into the dining-room, where a four-year-old girl nursed a doll and played with a robust baby by turns. They were merry, healthy children, and their chubby prettiness swelled his heart with pride.

These were his; he had fathered them. And just through that partitioning wall was a woman who was all his, too; one of the prettiest of women, and his wife.

"Hallo, kids!" he smiled at them from the door-way, "here's Daddy come back. Come and see if you remember him. What a great girl Minna's grown, and is that the baby Dadda left behind him?"

He picked up the baby and danced and dandled her, but the four-year-old Minna came more sagely, more slowly; she had to be won over by bribe and strategy, and her aloofness made him a trifle sore.

In a moment or two he heard the maid go down the corridor and let in a boisterous boy, who ran into the dining-room swinging a satchel of books and pulled up short at seeing the stranger among them.

But his memory, older and longer than Minna's, served him.

"Daddy!" said George, shy and very nervous.

Osborn wondered why this boy was nervous of him. Forgetting his previous sharpness and irritation with the children, he now suddenly wanted George's confidence.

"Daddy's back!" he said, "with lots of stories to tell you about great big ships and trains and wonderful birds which _you_ never saw."

"How splendid!" said the boy, still very shy. He had a guilty feeling about his boisterous entry.

"I was afraid you would be cross with me for making a noise when I came in," he explained.

"Like you used to be," Minna added.

"I'm not cross, old son," Osborn said slowly.

"We're going to have tea now, Daddy," Minna continued, as the maid entered with a cloth and a tray.

Osborn stayed talking to the children while the tea things were set upon the table. He supposed that they would all have tea together in the way which he had once so heartily deplored, and which at this moment seemed so dear and homely, until he saw the maid standing respectfully behind her chair waiting for his departure.

He spoke genially, but ill at ease.

"You give them their tea, do you?"

"Yes, sir," she answered, "and I have taken tea into the sitting-room."

The baby was now sitting in a high chair, bland and fat and greedy, a bib about her neck. George and Minna, after a propitiatory smile at him, had climbed into their places.

"You don't mind if we begin, Daddy, do you?" George asked.

"Go on, old son," said Osborn hastily.

There was no more use there for the father who had been cross, so he returned to his wife.