"I don't quite know, but I think you are getting fond of your home and children."
"I haven't come home with any thoughts of the house or the children. I have come back, wholly and entirely, because of you."
He paused. Anstice did not speak. Her hands were loosely clasped round her knees, and she was gazing out upon the lake before her. On the opposite side was their home, set at the higher end of the beautiful sloping park. Its old chimneys rose behind the big shrubbery on one side, the sun was shining full on the glass in the windows. The cattle grazing under the big trees in the park, the fresh green of the wooded heights behind, and the buttercup meadows edging the lakeside below, all formed a picture of a sweet English home.
But though Anstice's gaze was dwelling on what she loved, her heart was hammering loudly. This masterful man by her side was not the indifferent husband of a year ago. She knew a crisis was now in their lives, and she was not sure whether she was ready to meet it. She would have liked to slip on a little longer in the way that they had been going.
So she did not respond to him. She just listened to what he had to tell her.
"I went away," he said, "because the situation had become impossible for me, and I went to consider the relative values of things. As I fished in Norway, I threshed the subject out, but your figure was always before me. Looking back now, I see what a brutally selfish bargain I made with you. But my ideals of women were shattered, and I only cared for my own peace and comfort. Then, when I returned home, and saw what a good woman's presence and influence could do and how my home and children were transformed, I settled down selfishly still to bask in the sunshine, and to enjoy the fruit of your labours. But as time went on, Anstice, I began to see that such a life would not satisfy me. You yourself, not by any premeditated effort on your part—I think that would have choked me off—but by your personality, your power, your love for every one and everything needing love, in this world; your infinite patience, and may I say your delicious lapses from the divine to the most common things of this life, all this built up afresh for me the ideal womanhood as it should be. It gave me back my faith in women, and in God. I never spoke to you of my mother."
He stopped, and pulled out his watch. Opening the back of it, he held it out to her, and there was an exquisite miniature of a white-haired, dark-eyed woman, a woman with sweet, tender mouth, a determined chin and keen, purposeful eyes. Looking from her face to his, Anstice exclaimed:
"You are like her."
He shook his head.
"She was all that a mother and wife ought to be, and I expected my wife to be like her. I only tell you this to excuse myself. And having once been disillusioned, I had no use for any women afterwards. You knew this when you married me."