After the first greetings, they walked slowly round the square together, his arm around her waist. Neither said very much for some minutes, but Leander was wildly, foolishly happy, and there was no severity in Matilda's eyes when they shone in the lamp-light.
"Well," he said, at last, "and so I've actually got you safe back again, my dear, darling Tillie! It seems like a long eternity since last we met. I've been so beastly miserable, Matilda!"
"You do seem to have got thinner in the face, Leander dear," said Matilda, compassionately. "What have you been doing while I've been away?"
"Only wishing my dearest girl back, that's all I've been doing."
"What! haven't you given yourself any enjoyment at all—not gone out anywhere all the time?"
"Not once—leastwise, that is to say——" A guilty memory of Rosherwich made him bungle here.
"Why, of course I didn't expect you to stop indoors all the time," said Matilda, noticing the amendment, "so long as you never went where you wouldn't take me."
Oh, conscience, conscience! But Rosherwich didn't count—it was outside the radius; and besides, he hadn't enjoyed himself.
"Well," he said, "I did go out one evening, to hear a lecture on Astronomy at the Town Hall, in the Gray's Inn Road; but then I had the ticket given me by a customer, and I reely was surprised to find how regular the stars was in their habits, comets and all. But my 'Tilda is the only star of the evening for me, to-night. I don't want to talk about anything else."
The diversion was successful, and Matilda asked no more inconvenient questions. Presently she happened to cough slightly, and he touched accusingly the light summer cloak she was wearing.