The door opened into a narrow corridor leading into a small apartment, the furniture of which was not yet set in order. A roll of carpet and some mats stood in a corner, chairs and tables with burlaps round their legs waited here and there, a cot with a mattress on it, evidently to be transformed into a “couch,” held packages of bafflingly irregular shapes and sizes. In the tiny kitchen new pots and pans and kettles, some still wrapped in paper, tilted themselves at various angles on the gleaming new range or on the closed lids of the doll-sized stationary wash-tubs.
Little Ann had been very busy, and some of the things were unpacked. She had been sweeping and mopping floors and polishing up remote corners, and she had on a big white pinafore-apron with long sleeves, which transformed her into a sort of small female chorister. She came into the narrow corridor with a broom in her hand, her periwinkle-blue gaze as thrilled as an excited child's when it attacks the arrangement of its first doll's house. Her hair was a little ruffled where it showed below the white kerchief she had tied over her head. The warm, daisy pinkness of her cheeks was amazing.
“Hello!” called out Tembarom at sight of her. “Are you there yet? I don't believe it.”
“Yes, I'm here,” she answered, dimpling at him.
“Not you!” he said. “You couldn't be! You've melted away. Let's see.” And he slid his parcels down on the cot and lifted her up in the air as if she had been a baby. “How can I tell, anyhow?” he laughed out. “You don't weigh anything, and when a fellow squeezes you he's got to look out what he's doing.”
He did not seem to “look out” particularly when he caught her to him in a hug into which she appeared charmingly to melt. She made herself part of it, with soft arms which went at once round his neck and held him.
“Say!” he broke forth when he set her down. “Do you think I'm not glad to get back?”
“No, I don't, Tem,” she answered, “I know how glad you are by the way I'm glad myself.”
“You know just everything!” he ejaculated, looking her over, “just every darned thing—God bless you! But don't you melt away, will you? That's what I'm afraid of. I'll do any old thing on earth if you'll just stay.”
That was his great joke,—though she knew it was not so great a joke as it seemed,—that he would not believe that she was real, and believed that she might disappear at any moment. They had been married three weeks, and she still knew when she saw him pause to look at her that he would suddenly seize and hold her fast, trying to laugh, sometimes not with entire success.