She threw her arms about his neck, he put his about her waist, and they were still--until the children claimed their share of notice.
'To think that you should come home to-day!'
She spoke as if the day were sanctified by his coming. She was a woman whose beauty was rare both in type and in degree. Small, there was that about her which caused the defect, if defect it was, to go unnoticed. She moved with a grace and freedom which dignified her every gesture. The eye followed her with continual joy. Every change of attitude was a fresh delight. Whether in movement or repose she suggested the physical side of life at its highest and its best; she seemed charged, to the finger-tips, with so delicious a vitality. The thing about her face which struck one most was its expression of perfect innocence. One wondered if such a being ever could grow old. One felt sure that she would face whatever fortune fate might send her with the same quaint illuminating smile, and that nothing would ever shake her faith in the good that was to be.
Mr. Merrett had a child on either knee. His wife was kneeling beside his chair, regarding him with a rapturous affection which it was curious to contemplate. A man's capacity to win and retain a woman's love is by no means necessarily dependent on his moral qualities. Which is fortunate for some of us.
'James,' she whispered, from the post of vantage her head occupied upon his shoulder, 'when you come home the whole world seems somehow different.'
Her tongue betrayed her. Her speech was hardly that of an educated woman, and yet her voice was such a sweet one, and her manner so naturally refined, that one could not doubt that it needed but little to make her command over the King's English greater than it was.
'Seems different, doesn't it? Now that's strange. Do you think, having come, if I stayed it would keep on seeming different?'
'O James, if you would stay--a week.'
One could not but perceive that her sentence had changed between its beginning and its end. He chose to construe the alteration in a fashion of his own.
'A week! You don't think it would keep on seeming different if I stayed longer than that?'