He hurried forward, sat down close to her, and laid a hand over hers which held the knitting.
"What's that?" he asked.
"George's winter stockings; they're to have turn-down tops like grown-up ones."
He took the knitting and pretended to examine the pattern, though he was not thinking of anything save her.
The year's parting had been a miracle. Love had slyly redecorated his house throughout.
"Jolly nice," he commented on the stockings, "but, please, give me my tea now."
He smiled at her a lazy, autocratic smile. All this flat and the people in it were his, and he would not have changed it for a throne. He thought again, though in a more mature fashion, much as he used to do in the first married year, how good it was to come in and shut your own door upon a snubbed world.
She answered the smile by one faint and chilly and reposeful. Leaning forward she began to busy herself with the tea things. The sugar tongs poised: "Let's see," she cogitated, "it was two lumps, wasn't it?"
He assented, surprised. "Time I came home," he said, affecting to grumble lightly.
"What do you think of the children?" she asked. "I suppose you find them grown? Did they remember you?"