“Thank you so much for your beautiful letters,” she said, gently pressing his arm.
He blushed and made no reply.
Then they returned to the hotel, and he told her anecdotes, in connection with his tour.
He had ordered dinner to be served in the large dining-room at the table where they used to sit. They sat down without saying grace.
It was a tête-à-tête dinner. He took the bread-basket and offered her the bread. She smiled. It was a long time since he had been so attentive. But dinner at a seaside hotel was a pleasant change and soon they were engaged in a lively conversation. It was a duet in which one of them extolled the days that had gone, and the other revived memories of “once upon a time.” They were re-living the past. Their eyes shone and the little lines in their faces disappeared. Oh! golden days! Oh! time of roses which comes but once, if it comes at all, and which is denied to so many of us—so many of us.
At dessert he whispered a few words into the ear of the waitress; she disappeared and returned a few seconds later with a bottle of champagne.
“My dear Axel, what are you thinking of?”
“I am thinking of the spring that has past, but will return again.”
But he wasn’t thinking of it exclusively, for at his wife’s reproachful words there glided through the room, catlike, a dim vision of the nursery and the porridge bowl.
However—the atmosphere cleared again; the golden wine stirred their memories, and again they lost themselves in the intoxicating rapture of the past.