“To see our house,” she corrected, smiling mysteriously. “I always knew that some day I’d meet the little god Love; and so I got a house ready for him. It’s a faery house, Teddy; only you and I can see it. If you were ever to tell any one, especially Mrs. Sheerug, it would vanish.”
“I’ll never, never tell. I won’t even tell Dearie. And does nobody, nobody but you and me, know about it?”
She hesitated; then, “Nobody,” she answered.
To have a secret with her which no one else shared, almost made up for the disappointment of not being married. Holding her hand, he watched eagerly the flying rows of houses, trying to guess which was the one.
“It’s in nearly the next street, Teddy.”
“This one?”
“Not this one. Ours has a little white gate and a garden; it’s ever so much cosier.”
They had left the traffic where the snow was churned into mud. Once more it was a world of spun glass, of whiteness and quiet, that they traversed. To Teddy it seemed that the cab was magic; it knew its way out of ugliness to the places where dreams grow up.
The cab halted; the window flew back and the doors opened of themselves. They stepped out on to the pavement. The little white gate was there, just as Vashti had said. A path led up, through snow as soft as cotton-wool, to a red-brick nest of a house. A look of warmth lay behind its windows. Plants, leaning forward to catch the light, pressed against the panes. A canary fluttered in a gilded cage like a captured ray of sun.
A maid in cap and apron answered the bell. She was not at all like Jane, who never looked tidy till after lunch.