"I'm not sure—but somewhere for away—Canada, or California, or some big, wild country where we can ride about all day and imagine ourselves back in dear old Ireland again."
She sighed with pleasure; and two minutes later fell asleep with a tender little smile upon her lips.
CHAPTER XXIX
On a beautiful evening in June, when the land was sweet with roses, and the cuckoos called insistently to one another from copse and wood, Owen Rose brought his wife home, for the second time, to Greenriver.
They had spent the intervening weeks in Italy; and to the end of her life Toni would look upon those glorious Italian days as her true honeymoon.
Now, indeed, she and Owen were really lovers, meeting on an equal ground through the very force of their mutual love. Gone for ever were the old doubts and misunderstandings, the miserable fooling of inferiority on Toni's side, the half-unconscious irritation with which Owen had viewed what seemed to be his wife's limitations.
No miracle had been worked. Toni and Owen both knew very well that in literary matters Owen would always be superior to Toni; but now that they were one in ambition, one in feeling, one in heart and soul, this superiority mattered little.
Now that she was no longer frightened, no longer felt herself despised, Toni could give her natural intelligence full play; and when once Owen took the trouble to study Toni closely, he thanked his gods that he had discovered her worth before it was too late.
What he had taken for stupidity was only diffidence. Toni's brain, though not so highly specialized as his own, was a very capable, quick organ all the same; and in the lonely, dreary months of her absence Owen had learned to value at their true worth the precious gifts of laughter and sunny, unselfish gaiety which had once lightened the stately old house. When Toni disappeared, it seemed as though a living sunbeam had deserted the household; and when, on announcing the news of her safety and ultimate return, he had seen the faces of the servants break into relieved smiles, Owen had felt, with a twinge of shame, that even her dependants had valued Toni more than he, her husband, had known how to do.