He hesitated a moment, and then said, laughing, "It didn't occur to me that you'd come to the station, and I fully intended to go somewhere and get a hair-cut that wouldn't proclaim me as coming straight from Hamstead, Vermont, and replenish the wardrobe that looked so inexhaustible to me last fall, before I presented myself to you."
Sylvia joined in his laugh. "Go ahead. I'll sit in the motor and wait for you. Afterwards we'll go shopping together."
"To buy things like these?" he asked, eyeing her costume with approval.
"No. I have enough clothes now. I was going to begin choosing our furniture—and thought you might be interested. Get in, dear, this is ours," she said, walking up to the limousine which Sally had described with such enthusiasm, and which now stood waiting for her, its door held open by a French chauffeur, who was smiling with true Gallic appreciation of his mistress's "affaire de coeur," "and here," she added, after they were comfortably seated inside, taking a gardenia from the flower-holder, "is a posy I've got for you."
"Thank you. Have you anything else?" he asked, folding his hand over hers as she pinned it on.
"Oh, Austin, you're such a funny lover!"
"Why?"
"Because you nearly always—ask beforehand. Why don't you take what you've a perfect right to—if you want it?"
"Possibly because I don't feel I have a perfect right to—or sure that I have any right at all," he answered gravely, "and I can't believe it's really real yet, anyway. You see, I only had two days with you—the new way—before you left, and I had no means of knowing when I should have any more—and a good deal of doubt as to whether I deserved any."
There was no reproach in the words at all, but so much genuine humility and patience that Sylvia realized more keenly than ever how selfish she had been.