The kitchen door opened softly, very softly; we stood breathless in the corner. If it were a burglar, we were ready; were not all the massive British kitchen utensils near? The lamplight fell full upon the face and form of a strange man, a very strange man, the strangest I ever saw, plump, round of face, with straggling, irregular locks of hair that had been newly shorn,—a decidedly strange man, in Peter's clothes.
"You—you hussy!" said Peter, but the sorry epithet expressed a world of relief, even, I thought, of endearment.
One would have supposed that Madge could not grow redder; yet her face became even more a flame.
"You, a respectable British female," said Peter, advancing with slow heaviness of tread, as if Madge's end would really come when he reached her and the Sunday clothes; "You, a British female, and the wife of an honest man, out on the highway in a man's clothes, my clothes." He took hold of her arm, but gently; he would not have dared do otherwise. His wife looked at him steadily; he could not meet her glance, and his eyes fell.
"You're little better than a suffragette," he said weakly.
"That may be," said Madge, not without a certain loftiness, touching her hair with a novel feminine gesture, "that may be; but I am better than an able-bodied man that doesn't hoffer himself to his country. The suffragettes are fighting for theirs."
Peter was stricken; he had nothing to say. Don, arriving and unable to understand, barked wildly at Madge, and she seemed to mind his remarks much more than she had Peter's. I could help it no longer, and I burst out laughing.
"Madge," I asked, "where have you been?"
"I've been to the recruiting station at Shepperton, 'm," said Madge, with one look at Peter. "I could bear it no longer; not a finger raised for King or Country."
Peter hung his head.