a telegram to say that he was coming
back.

She was waiting for him, walking in the garden, as she used to wait for
him more than three years ago, in excitement and ecstasy. The spring
made her wild with the wildness of her girlhood when the white April
evenings met her on her Dorset moors.

She knew again the virgin desire of desire, the poignant, incommunicable
passion, when the soul knows the body's mystery and the body half
divines the secret of the soul. She felt again that keen stirring of the
immortal spirit in mortal sense, her veins were light, they ran fire and
air, and the fine nerves aspired and adored. At moments it was as if the
veils of being shook, and in their commotion all her heights and depths
were ringing, reverberant to the indivisible joy.

It was so until she heard Brodrick calling to her at the gate. And at
his voice her wedded blood remembered, and she came to him with the
swift feet, and the flushed face uplifted, and the eyes and mouth of a
bride.

Up-stairs Gertrude Collett was dressing for dinner. She looked out at
her window and saw them walking up and down the long alley of the
kitchen garden, like children, hand in hand.

They were late for dinner, which was the reason, Brodrick thought, why
the Angel of the Dinner (as Jane called her) looked annoyed.

They were very polite and kind to her, sustaining a conversation devised
and elaborated for her diversion.

Gertrude was manifestly not diverted. She congratulated Brodrick on his
brilliant appearance, and said in her soft voice that his holiday had
evidently done him good, and that it was a pity he hadn't stayed away a
little longer. Brodrick replied that he didn't want to stay away longer.
He thought Gertrude looked fatigued, and suggested that a holiday would
do her good. She had better take one.

"I wish you would," said Jane.

"We both," said Brodrick, "wish you would."

Gertrude said she never wanted to take holidays. She got on better
without them. Jane looked at Brodrick.

"I might have gone with you," she said. "After all, Baby never did have
convulsions."

"I knew he wouldn't," said Brodrick, and remembered that it was Gertrude
who had said he would.

A pause in the dialogue robbed Gertrude's next remark of any relevance
it might have had.

"We've seen," said she, "a good deal of Mr. Tanqueray." (Another pause.)
"I wonder how Mrs. Tanqueray gets on."

"I imagine," said Brodrick, "that she never did get on wit