Cripps!—when the manservant in plain clothes said, "Step this way, upstairs please"—W. Keyse and wife having applied at the area-door—"and Dr. Saxham will see you," the name, not having been mentioned in the advertisement, which gave only the address and an initial, imparted to both an electrical shock of surprise. They had looked a very small and very shabby and very lost and lonely little couple under those high-moulded ceilings and upon the Turkey carpets that covered the polished parquet of the handsomely-furnished and well-appointed consulting-room that the practitioner who had caved in through South African Gold-Mines had considered an adequate setting for his bald-browed and portly presence. Now both curved backbones assumed the perpendicular, and their wide Cockney mouths were wreathed in joyful smiles.
The man sitting in the Sheraton armchair at the writing-table that matched it, the man with the black head and square pale face and heavy muscular shoulders, who looked up from among his papers and notebooks with the receiver of a telephone at his ear, rose to his feet, and came to them with a kind, outstretched hand. Saxham never wasted a word or forgot a face. And here were two faces from Gueldersdorp. He shook the hands that belonged to them, and said in his curt way:
"How are you, Mrs. Keyse? And you, Keyse? You may guess when I heard that somebody had called to answer my advertisement I hardly imagined that two old patients had dropped down on me from the skies!"
The young woman stared at Saxham with her mouth agape and the tears trickling down her hollow cheeks. The young man swallowed something with a violent effort, and blurted out:
"Lumme, Doctor! it's more by 'arf like bein' shot up out of the Other Shop—an' landin' in the middle of New Jerusalem! Weeks along"—he picked up the shabby bowler that had dropped upon the Turkey carpet—"for weeks along I've been tryin' to find out what was the matter wi' me! Now I knows! I've bin 'omesick—fair old 'omesick for a sniffer of the very plyce I was 'oppin' with 'appiness to git away out of four months back. Good old Gueldersdorp!" He winked the wet out of his eyes and pointed to Mrs. Keyse with his elbow. "An' look at 'er! Doin' a blub on the strength of it! That's wot it is to be a woman! Ain't it, sir?"
Saxham's keen glance took in the altered shape of the thin girl in the mended jacket and the large and feathered hat that topped the colossal structure of fair, frizzled hair, even as she dried her eyes with a twopenny handkerchief edged with cotton lace, and tried to laugh. He took the lean chin of W. Keyse between his white, strong, supple fingers, and turned the triangular, hollow-cheeked face to the light, and said, touching the little round blue scar left by the enemy's bullet at the angle of the wide left nostril and the other mark of its egress below the inner corner of the right eye:
"You found out what a woman can be, my man, when she helped to nurse you at the Hospital."
"Gawd knows I did!" affirmed W. Keyse. "An' since she's bin' my wife——" The prominent Adam's apple in his thin throat jerked. He gulped a sob down as he looked at her. And the red flew up in her pale cheeks, and in her eyes, as she returned the look of him, her master and her mate, there shone the answering light of love. And Saxham's face darkened with angry blood, and his strong, supple surgeon's hand clenched with the savage impulse to dash itself in the face of this ragged, seedy, out-at-elbows Millionaire who flaunted riches in the face of his own beggary.
Never, never would a woman's eyes kindle with that sweet fire in answer to the challenge of his own! Empty, empty the heart whose chambers were swept and decked and garlanded for a guest who never came! Lonely, lonely, desolate this life lived within sound of her, sight of her, touch of her—dearer inexpressibly than ever woman was yet to man!
He had said to her: "But come to me, and I shall be content—even happy. Live under my roof, take the shelter of my name—I ask no more!"