Ev’n to a deil
To skelp and scaud poor dogs like me
An’ hear us squeal.
HE returned to her. She was in dressing-gown, fresh, indolent, gay. She held out her hand to him.
“What a strange man you are! Couldn’t you sleep?”
“No. I couldn’t sleep.
“Poor old thing. I slept wonderfully.”
Had she felt nothing? Had she no suspicion of the agony that had driven him from her side? Of the sick hope of comfort and reassurance that had brought him back to her? A faint shadow of fear had crossed her face on his entrance, but it had vanished when he spoke.
Indeed he was reassured. Her gaiety and charm disarmed him. The sun came streaming through the window upon her hair; her eyes danced; she glowed in her health and physical well-being. He had no other creature to whom to turn. Under the spell of her radiance he appealed to her, who had wounded him, to repair the hurt. She petted him, made much of him, denied him the relief of activity, and had him to sit with her in the heather with his head in her lap while she crooned to him of how happy she was, and how proud a wife, and how this honeymoon would never come to an end. There was a drugging beauty in her voice that soothed him and had him dwelling in a honeyed sleep. It was sweet to lie in the sun and gaze through half-closed lids at the pale sky and stifle the voices of hostility that stirred in him at her touch, at the caressing notes in her voice, at her perpetual drone of contented triumph. She allowed him silence, but then only the more keenly could he feel her presence. She would sigh out of it:
“A—a—ah! If we could stay like this forever and ever, in this quiet, lovely place filled with nothing but us two! If we could stay!”