"Does that improve me?"

"You don't want improving."

He sat down by the dressing-table, while she stood, fixing the glittering circle round her hair with clever fingers. He kept his hand on her waist and, leaning forward, looked at her in the glass. She had a lithe naturalness, a slim strength, which newly arrested his admiration. Struck by the charm of his own wife, he missed no detail of her appearance. She had dressed to please herself with a true woman's delight in _dessous_; and he was quick to notice the mauve gleam of ribbon shoulder straps under the filmy black of her bodice, which gave the sombre gown a charming colour-note; her sleeves, transparent, long, and braceleted round the wrists with black velvet bands, showed the whole length of her white arms; in her ears amethyst earrings repeated the note of the mauve ribbons. Her stockings were silk and her slippers of velvet.

She was as amazing to him as a beautiful stranger.

"It doesn't go with my earrings," she said carelessly when she had fixed the band, "but it's so pretty, and thank you ever so much."

She turned and showed him; and she showed him, too, the interest she took in herself, which had caused her to pull out those waves of fluffy hair over the tops of her ears, from under the hair-band, and the curls she had pulled from beneath to dance on her forehead.

"Give me a kiss for it," he said, drawing her down.

She kissed him lightly.

"Fancy you the mother of a family!" he remarked, with a look at the screened corner.

She smiled to herself, and began fingering the other things. "How nice they are! And silk stockings! They're always welcome."

"But you're wearing them already," he said, with rather a disappointed glance at her ankles.

"That doesn't matter. If there's one thing you can't glut a woman with, it's silk stockings."

"Thanks, Mrs. Kerr! I'll remember that when I come home in the small hours and have to provide a peace offering."

"Come home any time you like," she said goodhumouredly, "there will always be peace as far as I am concerned."

When he had entered the room, he had missed something in it; and now it occurred to him what it was.

"Where's my bed?" he demanded.

"In the dressing-room. I had it moved there, when you went; I thought I might as well give myself more space."

"Of course! I noticed something unusual about the dressing-room. You waited for me to move it back here, I suppose? It's rather a tough job for women."

"The hall-porter would have done it, you know."

"Never mind, pet. I'll do it ever so quietly after dinner."

She did not reply.

"Are you ready?" he asked. "Come back to the fire, and sit down.

There's so much to tell each other about, isn't there?"

She moved to the door acquiescently and switched out the light, he following. A savoury smell crept through the chinks of the kitchen door, with the all-pervasiveness of cookery in flats. He sniffed it.

"How familiar! But you don't do the cooking now?"

"No; I only help, sometimes. Ann's a treasure."

"What do we pay her?"

"Thirty pounds a year."

"Whew!"

She cast a sidelong glance at him. "A domestic drudge is worth it, I assure you; women have been consistently underrated."

"But fool work like cleaning saucepans and helping with the kids--"

"Shutting oneself up with the sink; working early; working late; breathing ashes and dust and grease; keeping tolerably civil and cheerful over it ... that's the job we're speaking of. I ought to know all about it," she said in a low voice, as if to herself.

She sat in her corner of the chesterfield and took up her knitting. He sat down, too, by her, all at once alert, surveying the flying movements of her dear hands; hands as tender and white as ever he remembered them.

"Oh come!" he said in affectionate but uneasy remonstrance, "you don't look much as if you'd been shut up with the sink, working early and working late."

"You forget I've had a whole year's holiday." She kept her eyes on her work, as if re-casting that first year upon her busy needles. "At least," she reflected, almost as if to herself, "part of the time was only half-holiday; but the last six months have been wonderful."

Jealousy rose in Osborn; jealousy of he knew not what. Something or someone had brought colour and smiles to her, and it was not himself.

As he began to suggest that fact to himself, before he could do more than begin: "How, do you mean--?" the door opened, and the maid announced: "Dinner is served, ma'am."

Marie sprang up and put her hand kindly in his arm.

"Come along," she said. "We have all your favourite things, so I hope you're hungry."

CHAPTER XXII

PLAIN DEALING

Re-entering the dining-room Osborn was struck by its comfort and charm. It was a room humanised by the hand of a kind and clever woman.

And how well-ordered his table was! How nice his silver looked! How well his wife looked! What good cooking he could command! And in what attractively comfortable circumstances he now found himself after that year which had ended by palling; that year in which he had done as other men--free men!

There was no place like home, for permanence; no woman like the wife of one's choice, for permanence. These were the things which mattered.

He was moved to speak to her in some measure of this thought during dinner. They were not separated from one another by the whole breadth of the table. He sat on his wife's right hand, and the maid served them from the sideboard, an arrangement which pleased him because it saved him the trouble of carving, and also because it was rather smart, he thought, for home, where things generally tended to be dowdy.

"I've had an awf'ly good time, this last year," he confided, "but I'm glad to be back. There's nothing like one's own home and one's own girl." The maid having gone to the kitchen, he reached for and squeezed his wife's hand. "I'm going to be an awf'ly good boy now you've got me again," he assured her.

"Don't bore yourself," she said with gentle politeness.

"What--what queer things women say!" he observed, after a pause, in which he had regarded her with some surprise.

"Not so queer as the things men do," she replied thoughtfully.