e smiling upon him, merry, tired, and
tolerant. She had, as it were, demonstrated her claim not only to her
present, but to her past. For if she had not copied Gwendolen in the
mid-Victorian backwater, why should she have copied her in this? She had
been first in both, and in her backwater she was now safe.

* * * * *

Many months passed before he saw Gwendolen's drawing-room again. He was
felled early in the winter by a long and dangerous illness. When he was
able to crawl about, he went to the south of France and stayed there for
over a year. He was so ill, so tired, and so weak that, if Gwendolen and
the boys hadn't joined him, if she hadn't nursed and amused and
encouraged him from day to day, he felt that he should probably have
died and made an end of it. Gwendolen was more than kind. She was at
once tender and tactful, and the only claim she made was that of her
long-standing solicitude on his account. Upon this, as upon a
comfortable, impersonal cushion that she adjusted for his weary head,
she invited him to lean, and upon it for months of dazed invalidism and
dubious convalescence he did lean. Lapped round by this fundamental
kindness, the flaws and absurdities of Gwendolen's character
disappeared. The long pearl ear-rings dangled now over the most
delicious beef-teas, which she herself made for him; the graceful hands
could perform efficient tasks. Of how very little importance it was that
a woman should not show originality in her drawing-room when she could
show in taxing daily intercourse such wisdom and resource and sweetness!
Life had contracted about them, and on these simple and elementary terms
he found that Gwendolen neither bored nor ruffled him. When she at last
left him he knew that the bond between them, unspoken as it remained,
was stronger than it had ever yet been, and that when he next saw her he
would probably find it the most natural of things to ask her to marry
him, and to take care of him for ever. Poor, good, kind Gwendolen! It
was with a pensive humility and mirth that he resigned himself to the
thought of the bad bargain she would make.

He came back to England in the spring following that in which he had
left it, and went at once to Chislebridge. It was late afternoon when he
drove, in a twilight like his own mood of meditative acceptance, to the
well-known house. Ample and benignant it stood behind its walls and
lawns and trees, and seemed to look up