She thought him looking extremely well and fit. He appeared younger and altogether more sure of himself. And the stoop of the shoulders was less noticeable; he carried himself better. He met her eyes and smiled.
“I rather suspected your early morning activity was a cultivation,” he said. “It is possible, I have found, to discard habits as well as to cultivate them.”
That was the only reference he made to the long months he had spent fighting his baser self. He did not know whether she caught the drift of his remark. It did not seem to him to matter much. There was manifestly very little need for explanations on either side. They took one another for granted. They took their love for one another for granted; it stood revealed, a thing which needed no words, which expressed itself mutely in their satisfaction in one another. They gazed into each other’s eyes, and there was no shadow of doubt in their minds at all.
“You are looking well,” she said.
“Yes,” he said; “I feel well. I feel amazingly, extravagantly well. So do you. You’re radiant. That’s because we are feeling so extremely pleased, both of us, with life and with ourselves,—particularly with ourselves. We are going to have the best of times together. I have been looking forward to this for months. And now you’re here... It is almost as if we had never parted. It’s better, really; the break brings us nearer. It’s just good.”
The happiness which she felt shone in her face. She looked about her at the familiar little garden, at the homely comfortable hotel, and the small stoep in front of the house, where John and Mary waited, John seated on the steps with his precious suit-case beside him. Then she looked back into the man’s face, and her eyes were grave and tender when they met his.
“I had forgotten the children,” she said.
He glanced over his shoulder.
“The little chap with the suit-case,” he said. “And the girl—yes. Who are they?”
She explained them.