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,