His mood was one of almost tremulous elation. He was bringing her home after bridal wanderings that had never lost their element of dream-like unreality. There had always been the feeling that he might wake any day to find Italy and Karen both equally illusory. But to see Karen in his home, taking her place in his accustomed life, would be to feel his joy linking itself securely with reality.
The look of London at this sunny hour of late afternoon and at this autumnal season matched his consciousness of a tranquil metamorphosis. Idle still and empty of its more vivid significance, one yet felt in it the soft stirrings of a re-entering tide of life. Cabs passed, piled with brightly badged luggage; the drowsily reminiscent shop-windows showed here and there an adventurous forecast, and a house or two, among the rows of dumb, sleeping faces, opened wide eyes at the leisurely streets. The pale, high pinks of the sky drooped and melted into the greys and whites and buffs below, and blurred the heavy greens of the park with falling veils of rose. The scene seemed drawn in flat delicate tones of pastel.
Karen sat beside him in the cab and, while she gazed before her, she had slipped her hand into his. She had preserved much of the look of the unmarried Karen in her dress. The difference was in the achievement of an ideal rather than in a change. The line of her little grey travelling hat above her brows was still unusual; with her grey gloves and long grey silken coat she had an air, cool, competent, prepared for any emergency of travel. She would have looked equally appropriate dozing under the hooded light in a railway carriage, taking her place at a table d'hôte in a provincial French town, or walking in the wind and sun along a foreign plage. After looking at the London to which he brought her, Gregory looked at her. Marriage had worked none of its even superficial disenchantments in him. After three months of intimacy, Karen still constantly arrested him with a sense of the undiscovered, the unforeseen. What it consisted in he could not have defined; she was simple, even guileless, still; she had no reticences; yet she seemed to express so much of which she was unaware that he felt himself to be continually making her acquaintance. That quiet slipping now of her hand into his, while her gaze maintained its calm detachment, the charm of her mingled tenderness and independence, had its vague sting for Gregory. She accepted him and whatever he might mean with something of the happy matter-of-fact with which she accepted all that was hers. She loved him with a completeness and selflessness that had made the world suddenly close round him with gentle arms; but Gregory often wondered if she were in love with him. Rapture, restlessness and fear all seemed alien to her, and to turn from thoughts of her and of their love to Karen herself was like passing from dreams of poignant, starry ecstasy to a clear, white dawn, with dew on the grass and a lark rising and the waking sweetness of a world at once poetical and practical about one. She strengthened and stilled his passion for her. And she seemed unaware of passion.
They arrived at the great, hive-like mansion and in the lift, which took them almost to the top, Karen, standing near him, again put her hand in his and smiled at him. She was not feeling his tremor, but she was limpidly happy and as conscious as he of an epoch-making moment.
Barker opened the door to them, murmuring a decorous welcome and they went down the passage towards the drawing-room. They must at once inaugurate their home-coming, Gregory said, by going out on the balcony and looking at the view together.
"I beg your pardon, sir," said Barker, who followed after them, "but I hope you and Mrs. Jardine will think it best what I've done with the large case, sir, that has come. I didn't know where you'd like it put, and it was a job getting it in anywhere. There wasn't room to leave it standing here."
"Tante's present!" Karen exclaimed. "Oh, where is it?"
"I had it put in the drawing-room, Ma'am," said Barker. "It made a hole in the wall and knocked down two prints, sir; I'm very sorry, but there was no handling it conveniently."
They turned down the next passage; the drawing-room was at the end. Gregory threw open the door and he and Karen paused upon the threshold. Standing in the middle of the room, high and dark against the half-obliterated windows, was a huge packing-case, an incredibly huge packing-case. At a first glance it had blotted out the room. The furniture, huddled in the corners, seemed to have drawn back from the apparition, scared and startled, and Gregory, in confronting it, felt an actual twinge of fear. The vast, unexpected form loomed to his imagination, for a moment, like a tidal-wave rising terrifically in familiar surroundings and poised in menace above him and his wife. He controlled an exclamation of dismay, and the ominous simile receded before a familiar indignation; that, too, he controlled; he could not say: "How stupid!"
"Is it a piano?" Karen, after their long pause, asked in a hushed, tentative voice.