“John, how wet you are! Come to the fire, and let me dry your coat. I had a feeling that you would come to-night.”
She led him to the fire; yet though the initiative was hers, she went with his arm about her waist.
“You are looking wondrous well, Barbe!”
“Am I?” And she colored, and hid her eyes from him a moment. “I am glad, very glad, to have you back, John. I was afraid, with this rough weather, and the roads so bad, and you riding alone.”
“And yet I was not alone,” he said, touching her hair reverently. “I shall never be alone again, pray God.”
“Yes, dear, I understand.” And she put her face up for him to kiss her, her eyelids closed and the lashes shading her cheeks.
Then she made him sit down in the chair before the fire, and, fetching the rough towel that hung on one of the doors, she rubbed his coat while he sat patiently and tried not to look amused. For there was something infinitely quaint and sweet in this ministration to a man who had seen the wild world in its cups and in its quarrels. He caught the two hands and kissed them, and looked up into eyes that were full of a mysterious tremor of light.
“Do you know, child, what you bring into my mind?”
“No, John.”
“All the rough, blasphemous, accursed things that a man must see in this world, whether he wills it or not. They come to me, dear, as so many black memories, and I lift up these white hands—so—and I see what is clean and what is pure.”