When I come in sight of my house I was so busy thinking how she’d like hers that I didn’t see for a minute what my front yard had in it. And when I did see, my heart kind of went plap!—but a pleasant plap. My front yard looked so exactly the way I’d used to dream of it looking, and it never had. It was little and neat and green, with flowers and a white door-step as usual, but out in front was a little girl, with my clothes-rope doubled up for lines, and she was driving round and round the pansy bed a little boy. Just before I got to the gate, and before they saw me, they dropped the rope and went off around the house hand in hand, like they’d known each other all their days.
“I wish everybody was like that,” thinks I, and went in my front door and through to the dining-room.
And there, sitting on my couch with their arms around each other, was the Toll Gate House lady and my roomer, Mr. Dombledon.
“Well,” says I. “Sudden—but real friendly!”
I see I had to say something, for they didn’t seem real capable of it. And besides, I’d begun to suspicion, deep in the part of the heart that ain’t never surprised at love anywheres.
Mr. Dombledon come over to me—and now his eyes were like the sitting-room with all the curtains up.
“Oh, ma’am!” he says, “how did you know? How did you find out?”
“Know?” I says. “I know less all the time. And I ain’t found out yet. I’m a-waiting for you to tell me.”
“We’re each other’s wife and husband,” says he, neat but shy.
They told me as well as they could, now together, now separate, now both keeping still. I made it out more by means of the air than by means of words, anyhow. But this thing that he said came home to me then, and it’s never left me since: