"I have a thirst for simplicity and freshness and life," Milly went on, looking at the sky, "and how one feels them all here. Oh, the cuckoo, Christina, isn't it a sound that makes one think of tears and happiness!"
Of tears only, not of happiness, thought Christina; of regret—regret for something gone; lost for ever. The cuckoo's cry pierced her all day long.
Simplicity and freshness and life; Christina did not recall the words definitely when she saw Dick Quentyn spring up the steps to greet his wife at the threshold of the house; but something unformulated echoed in her mind with a deepened sense of presage.
Milly stretched out both her hands. "Welcome home, Dick," she said. And she held her cheek to be kissed. There was no restraint or shyness in her eyes. She looked at the bronzed, stalwart, smiling being with as open and happy a gaze as though he had been an oak-tree. The happiness of gaze was new; but then it was only part of Milly's revival; and then, he had been in danger. Christina took comfort, she knew not for what.
"It is good to be at home again," Dick asseverated more than once during the day; and, "I say, how jolly those primroses look," he exclaimed in the long drawing-room.
Milly, her arm in Christina's, stood beside him. "I gathered them, Dick, all of them, and arranged them, in honour of your return."
"Oh, come now!" Dick Quentyn ejaculated with humorous incredulity.
Milly smiled, making no protest. He, she and Christina walked about the grounds. Christina had felt a curious shrinking from joining them, a shrinking, in any normal condition of things between husband and wife, so natural that it was only with a shock of amazement that she recognized its monstrousness as applied to the actual one. She leave Milly alone with her husband! What a revolution in all their relations would such a withdrawal have portended! To leave them would have been to yield to morbid imaginations, to make them almost real; at all events to make them visible to Milly; and Milly certainly did not see them. Milly, indeed, seemed to see nothing.
She still held Christina's hand drawn through her arm while they walked and listened to Dick's laconic and much prompted recital of his African adventures.
"I do hope you won't go off on any more terrible expeditions of this sort for a very long time, Dick," said Milly. "I expected every morning to read in the newspaper that you'd been eaten by savages."