o be at home again," Dick asseverated more than once during
the day; and, "I say, how jolly those primroses look," he exclaimed in
the long drawing-room.

Milly, her arm in Christina's, stood beside him. "I gathered them, Dick,
all of them, and arranged them, in honour of your return."

"Oh, come now!" Dick Quentyn ejaculated with humorous incredulity.

Milly smiled, making no protest. He, she and Christina walked about the
grounds. Christina had felt a curious shrinking from joining them, a
shrinking, in any normal condition of things between husband and wife,
so natural that it was only with a shock of amazement that she
recognized its monstrousness as applied to the actual one. She leave
Milly alone with her husband! What a revolution in all their relations
would such a withdrawal have portended! To leave them would have been to
yield to morbid imaginations, to make them almost real; at all events to
make them visible to Milly; and Milly certainly did not see them. Milly,
indeed, seemed to see nothing.

She still held Christina's hand drawn through her arm while they walked
and listened to Dick's laconic and much prompted recital of his African
adventures.

"I do hope you won't go off on any more terrible expeditions of this
sort for a very long time, Dick," said Milly. "I expected every morning
to read in the newspaper that you'd been eaten by savages."

"Well, I wasn't among cannibals, you know," literal Dick objected, "and
I think I'll have to have another brush at it. Harvey is going out in a
month or so."

"And you are going with him?"

"Well, I rather think I shall," said Dick. "He is a splendid fellow, and
it seems my sort of thing."

Before dinner, in the drawing-room, he joined Christina, who was sitting
alone looking out at the evening. "As inseparable as ever, you and
Milly, aren't you?" he said, coming and standing over her, his genial
eyes upon her.

"Just as inseparable," she assented, looking up at him. She smiled with
an emphasis that was faintly defiant, though neither she nor Dick
recognized defiance.

"Milly is looking a little fagged, don't you think," he went on. "Has
she been doing too much this winter? You are frightfully busy, aren't
you? Milly always likes going at a great pace, I know."

"I should not have thought there was anything noticeable," said
Christina. "She was a little fagged, perhaps; but the country has
already refreshed her wonderfully."

"London always does pul