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.
Julia herself was sitting before the fire now, one slippered foot to the
blaze. Four years in London life had left her as lovely as ever; perhaps
there was even an increase of beauty i
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