I tell you, my heart jumped up then as much as it would of if I'd heard her say "I will" when they were married. For this was their new minute.
"Sit here," he says, and pulled her down to the big chair, and sat on the low chair beside her, where I'd seen him first. Only now, the baby wasn't there—it was just the two of them.
"Did you beat them all to pieces?" she asks, still with that blessed, casual, natural way of hers.
He smiled, sort of pleased and proud and humble. "I did," he owns up. "You're my wife, and I can brag to you if I want to. I walloped 'em."
He told her about the game, saying a lot of things that didn't mean a thing to me, but that must have meant to her what they meant to him, because she laughed out, pleased.
"Good!" she says. "You play a corking game, if I do say it. Do you know, you look a lot better than you did when you came home to dinner? I hate to see you look tired like that."
"I feel fit as a fish now," says he. "There's something about an evening like that with half a dozen of 'em—it isn't the game. It's the—oh, I don't know. But it kind of—"
He petered off, and she didn't make the mistake of agreeing too hard or talking about it too long. She just nodded, and pretty soon she told him some little thing about the baby. When he emptied his pipe, she said she thought she'd go to bed.
But when she got up, he reached up and pulled her back in the chair again, and moved so that he set with his cheek against hers. And he says: