and watched Josephine
bustling about the kitchen, he was glorying in the fact that he could
spend another hour with her, and sit opposite to her at the table
while she poured his tea for him and passed him the biscuits, just as
if--just as if--

Here Josephine looked straight at him with such intent and stern brown
eyes that David felt she must have read his thoughts, and he colored
guiltily. But Josephine did not even notice that he was blushing. She
had only paused to wonder whether she would bring out cherry or
strawberry preserve; and, having decided on the cherry, took her
piercing gaze from David without having seen him at all. But he
allowed his thoughts no more vagaries.

Josephine set the table with her mother's wedding china. She used it
because it was the anniversary of her mother's wedding day, but David
thought it was out of compliment to him. And, as he knew quite well
that Josephine prized that china beyond all her other earthly
possessions, he stroked his smooth-shaven, dimpled chin with the air
of a man to whom is offered a very subtly sweet homage.

Josephine whisked in and out of the pantry, and up and down cellar,
and with every whisk a new dainty was added to the table. Josephine,
as everybody in Meadowby admitted, was past mistress in the noble art
of cookery. Once upon a time rash matrons and ambitious young wives
had aspired to rival her, but they had long ago realised the vanity of
such efforts and dropped comfortably back to second place.

Josephine felt an artist's pride in her table when she set the teapot
on its stand and invited David to sit in. There were pink slices of
cold tongue, and crisp green pickles and spiced gooseberry, the recipe
for which Josephine had invented herself, and which had taken first
prize at the Provincial Exhibition for six successive years; there was
a lemon pie which was a symphony in gold and silver, biscuits as light
and white as snow, and moist, plummy cubes of fruit cake. There was
the ruby-tinted cherry preserve, a mound of amber jelly, and, to crown
all, steaming cups of tea, in flavour and fragrance unequalled.

And Josephine, too, sitting at the head of the table, with her smooth,
glossy crimps of black hair and cheeks as rosy clear as they had been
twenty years ago, when she had been a slender slip of girlhood and
bashful young David Hartley had looked at her over his hymn-book in
prayer-meeting and tramped all the way home a few feet behind her,
b