Joan came out to them, a little untidy as to dress and hair (why is it that the Muse can never be pursued in perfect neatness?) and moving vaguely, as if half in a dream. There was a faint vertical wrinkle between her brows which was new to Nikolai, but her pallor had given place to warm tan, and both face and figure showed a slight suggestion of fullness, a little matronly poise that was more charming than her Botticelli maigre had been.
As she passed her son, she swooped down upon him and lifted him with a fine free swing onto her shoulder.
"Hi there, old Dirt-in-the-Face! Where's your Dada?"
Mother and child made a memorable picture as they approached, the long lifting lines of the woman's body, her laughing face upturned to the boy, who straddled her shoulder unafraid of his high position, chuckling and kicking fat legs as she tickled him.
The two men who loved Joan exchanged a sympathetic glance. "Mine!" said each in his heart; the one triumphantly, the other with the little shrug that was habitual to him.
Not until she was close upon them did she realize who waited for her there beside Archie. She stopped short. Then, without a word, she put down her child and went to Nikolai and kissed him.
If that kiss, so impulsive and without self-consciousness, was like a stab in Nikolai's heart, he did not show it. She had not dared to kiss him when they parted.
There came back to him in that moment an echo of a certain prophesy he had once made to Archie: "I must warn you that when she does find her metier, you are more in danger of losing her to it than to me."
Was she lost to both of them, already?...
"Oh, but Stefan, dear, how tired you look!" ("And how old!" her thought finished.) "You've been working too hard over there!"