CHAPTER XXX.
Mr. Armstrong telegraphs to Mrs. Turner, who is still in occupation at Nutsgrove, and the old place is dusted, swept, aired, and garnished. One soft April day Addie comes home again, and walks heavily through the familiar rooms, leaning on her husband's arm. Almost from the first day he notices a change for the better in her appearance and manner; her step gains firmness, her appetite improves; and one night, about a week after their return, when she stands by the drawing-room window, her face buried in a bunch of lilac-blossoms, there comes a radiance to her eyes, an eager softness to her voice that thrills him with wild hope.
"I'm glad we came home; aren't you, Tom?" she whispers, nestling close to him. "Let us never go away again. I'm tired of wandering; and I shall get well here, I know, without going to Madeira or Algiers. I feel to-night that I should like to live. Things are coming back to me again that I once loved—you amongst them, Tom. I am growing fond of you again—oh, yes, life is coming to me with the summer, and even good looks also! Look!" she cries gayly, pulling him to a glass and putting her face close to his swarthy one. "Am I not almost pretty to-night? You'd know me if you met me in the streets now, wouldn't you, Tom? Why, I want only a little red in my cheeks, a few freckles on the bridge of my nose, and some curliness in my fringe to be myself again—quite my old self again!"
"You can do without the fringe, young lady," says Armstrong, who has the old-fashioned male distaste for the modern style of hairdressing, pushing back two or three lank locks from her forehead.
"No, no; I must have a fringe, a regular Skye-terrier one too; my face looks so bald and hard without it. It's all that horrible cod-liver oil that's coming out in my hair and making it so thin and straight! I won't take any more of it, Tom; it's of no use trying to force me," she adds, with a low soft laugh that comes to him like a strain of sweetest music. "I'm going to get well without it—you'll see."
Later on that evening she startles him by alluding for the first time to her sisters and brothers, quite casually too, as if the thought of them had just struck her incidentally. She has been looking over an old photographic album, and, stopping before one of her sisters—Pauline—she says lightly—
"The others, Tom? They are doing well, aren't they—dear old Jo and Polly and Bob and Hal and Lottchen?"
"Yes, yes, love," he answers eagerly. "They are all doing well, every one of them."
"I should like to see them again," she says, after a pause—"to see them all together sitting here around me as in the old days. Will you ask them to come, Tom?"