Hugh looked up at his wife, then scrambled round again and took up his old place at her knee.
“Besides, please God, there will be a child, will there not,” he said, “calling you mother and me father? Why, it will be nearly nine years old then! Did Peggy put that into her picture? If we are to look forward ten years, which is silly in any case, let us people our picture with the figures we hope to find there.”
Edith leaned over him.
“Peggy couldn’t have known that a year ago,” she said.
“Exactly; so she shouldn’t have talked like that. People have no business to draw doleful pictures and scatter doleful images of thought about in the world. To imagine a thing is to help it to come true.”
Then again as he looked up at the face that bent over him the love-light leaped to his eyes.
“Besides, what more does she think could be desired than what we have?” he said. “Has not your love crowned me? And if you don’t take that crown off——”
“Ah, don’t, Hughie!” she whispered.
For one last moment she felt an impulse to look again at Peggy’s picture, and in words cold, carefully chosen words, to draw it for him, to say to him all that Peggy had said, all that her own thoughts had suggested, to show him the snake among the flowers. But the impulse passed; perhaps, as Hugh had said, it was better not to scatter doleful images. Yet something of the inevitable lacrimæ rerum, something of the sadness inseparable from all human consciousness even when the joys of life are most vivid, were in her next words. Clothed though she was in the golden raiment of love, something still faintly twitched that mantle.
“Don’t talk of me discrowning you, even in jest,” she said. “That is a doleful image, though luckily an impossible one. But the years do pass, Hugh, there is no denying that, and one comes to the end of the chapters, and the ‘rose-scented manuscript’ has to close. That is all that Peggy meant, and in the nature of things it must close sooner for me than for you. Oh, yes, the chapters come to an end, and what a pleasant one will finish to-morrow—our winter and spring here! And I should like to tell you just once all it has been to me, to have you so much alone, all by myself, and to know that you haven’t—well, been bored. You haven’t; you have liked it enormously. I know you have been happier in these six months than ever before in your happy life. And that is my crown.”