Some of Us Are Married/Clytie Comes Back
CLYTIE COMES BACK
IT WAS February, the before-dawn of the year, when vitality is at its lowest and the problems of existence seem as if they could never be solved; when even in the most loving households there are sagging times when there seems no real uplift obtainable, and that Heaven-sent, saving angel, a sense of humour, sits humped together on the doorstep with folded wings, unable to enter.
To-night, like the reverberation of a wheel after the impetus has been removed, the stress and habit of the long business day still clung to Joseph Langshaw in a certain tenseness of manner. He hardly spoke at the table to little glowing dark-eyed Mary, except to reprove her, though gently, for spilling the usual glass of water, and to enjoin the chubby George—not so gently—to use his handkerchief. He listened with evident effort to the history of the day as told him, with a languid attempt at her usual vivacity, by his wife, who nervously took note of him, the colour coming momentarily into the too-pale cheeks. Once or twice he shifted his eyes toward her without any answering gleam in them, and shifted them quickly away again.
The dinner, at which the cheap and unexciting carrot flanked a pallid stew, and the dessert was something thin which ought to have been thick, failed to bring him back in spirit. Afterward he strolled off by himself. Clytie could hear him aimlessly walking around up above, opening and shutting bureau drawers, and pulling shades testingly up and down on their spring rollers. Once he called down, questioning her as to the whereabouts of a caster that nobody had seen since summer before last. When the interlude of kissing the children good-night in their tucked-in beds was over he came downstairs to the little library once more, dropped into a chair by the lamp, and taking up a book of George's that had once been his own, became apparently deeply immersed in it. His wife had been sitting by him for some time, her work dropped in her lap, her slight figure drooping, and her small, dark-curled head resting languidly in her too-thin arm, before he seemed to notice her, and closing the dilapidated red covers of the "Cornet of Horse," laid it resolutely on the table beside him.
"How have you felt to-day?" he asked.
"Oh, pretty well. I'm just a little tired now, that's all. Of course after diphtheria And the children had to have so many things done for them, I didn't get much chance to rest this afternoon, though I meant to."
"Been sweeping any?"
"No. Oh, well, I just gave a touch to the nursery. The house gets in such a perfect state and Minna was so long in coming upstairs—but that was nothing." Her tone changed. "That dinner was so dreadful to-night you couldn't eat a thing. I'll see about it myself to-morrow. I've been so bothered, everything costs so much, and I don't like to ask you for any more money when I know we're running behind." Clytie's eyelashes began to wink; her red lip trembled. "You see I haven't been able to go out and buy things myself as I used to, and"
"Oh, I wouldn't let a little thing like that bother me," said her husband carelessly, rising and humming a tune as he walked over to the mantelpiece, taking up a vase that had stood there for only thirteen years and examining it critically. He hummed very badly, and, as Clytie knew, only when he was perturbed. She watched him now until he came over to her.
"See here, Clytie," he said abruptly, "this sort of thing has got to be stopped. Everyone has been telling me how badly you're looking and that you ought to have a change. Even that old goat Rutter—Rutter!—was speaking of it coming out on the train to-night; said his wife thought perhaps I didn't notice it—the—fool! Of course I told him you were never better in your life. Thank Heaven, I can manage my own family affairs without the help of the neighbourhood!" His voice grew stormier. "But this sort of thing has got to be stopped, that's all there is about it. You wear yourself out for the house and the children. Let the children wait on themselves! Let the house go! Here I come home myself after a hard day's work and find that you've been sweeping, after what Doctor Coulter told you! You're not to touch a broom, do you hear? And as for the meals, you know perfectly well I don't care what I eat. Let Minna attend to them; that's what she's paid for. I tell you, if I once get after her she'll learn to cook in short order." He paused before giving vent to the man's shibboleth: "If I were to run my business like this I"
"Hark, there's Baby!" exclaimed Clytie anxiously, starting up.
"Sit down. I'll go up to her," said the husband resignedly. "She's got to quit this habit of waking every evening."
He tramped firmly up the stairs, but presently came down again with the three-year-old child, a plump, blanketed bundle, in his arms, her yellow hair straggling against his coat sleeve and her round, blue eyes regally content.
"Her feet were cold," he announced in excuse, displaying those members to the doubtful warmth of the smouldering logs on the hearth. There was something in that round little form that still held a glint of Heaven in it to the father's heart. Unnecessary as it was for Baby to hold up an evening in this way, the touch of her mysteriously lightened care.
"When does Mr. Wilkinson go back to California?" asked Clytie suddenly, after a few moments of a peaceful silence.
"Next week."
"And how are the business plans coming out with that Mr. Henkel he introduced you to?"
"Oh, the plans are all right," said Langshaw grimly. "I am the one that's hanging fire. I was to have charge of the office end of it, but you see I can't furnish the man Henkel wants for the other part of the job. It must be someone who can put in a little capital—they're letting me in without any—someone who has a technical knowledge of the machine, and is thoroughly familiar with the ground to be worked over. Sounds simple, but I'll be hanged if it is!"
"How about Mr. Ballard?"
"He can't raise the money."
"Mr. Francis?"
"He drinks. I've been searching my brain night and day. I've written letters to a few people, but they won't do any good. I can't take the time to look around. Henkel has been mighty nice about it—he doesn't know anybody here himself—but he can't wait for me much longer. He sails for Europe on the fifteenth, and he's got to get things settled before he goes; he's only giving me this chance because he's under obligation to Wilkinson. Dear old man! I fancy everybody's under some obligation to him. Green, from Philadelphia, will come on and take charge of things if I can't."
"Wouldn't it be possible for you to go in with him?"
Langshaw shook his head. "No, he has his own people."
"How much salary did they offer you?" asked Clytie timidly. "You didn't tell me."
"Five thousand."
There was an awed pause. Perhaps at no possible height of future prosperity could any sum look so large to the two concerned as that five thousand dollars.
The next moment Langshaw's tone changed to one of intense irritation as he bent over to prod the smoking logs: "Why under Heaven can we never get wood that burns? Don't order any more from Boggs. What on earth are you crying for?"
"I've tried so hard to get the right kind of wood. I s-s-sent word to Boggs twice about it—he sends that horrid cross-eyed man to take the order. And I know you have too much on your mind! I know it all the time, and I only want to help you and I can't seem to! You have to work so hard in the office for—for—that horrid firm, and George ought to be taken to the dentist, and you need a pair of new shoes yourself this minute, and I—I love you—I love you s-s-so much"
Langshaw controlled himself with an effort so great that it jarred him all over. The angel of the sense of humour ascended to the roof and perched there in a dejected heap. "If you keep on like this you'll make yourself ill, Clytie," he said firmly, though he didn't deny her the comfort of his dear hand as she sobbed on his shoulder over the bundled form of Baby, whose eyes in the midst of turmoil had closed. "What you need is a change—and money or rest; and in some way or another, by George, you've got to have it!"
II
Mrs. Langshaw had been away only a couple of times from her family in years gone by, short absences demanded by the illness of others, from which she had returned with all the swiftness of a homing bird. On various occasions since, the need of change had been urged for her, with always the same result—there was nowhere to go. Most of their intimate friends were in the place; relatives were inadequately situated as regards visitors; there was no money for resorts.
But when Langshaw came home the next night, somewhat earlier than usual, his brooding, tired, harassed eyes had a tender, superficial gleam in them; a smile curved the worn lines around his mouth as he announced:
"What do you think, children? Little Mother's got an invitation to go out to Los Angeles!"
"Where is Los Angeles?" asked Mary, climbing up on his knee, while the sturdy George, one rubber boot drawn off to expose a sodden stocking, paused arrested on the hearthrug.
"It's out in California, three thousand miles away; think of that!" answered the father. He went on quickly:
"It's all Wilkinson's doing, Clytie; dear old man! I was talking to him this morning about you, and the first thing I knew he was offering to take you out with him next week on his pass. He says it won't cost you a cent. He said his wife would be overjoyed to see any one from home, and the climate will fix you up as nothing else would. He just sat down and told me of some of the hard times he and his wife went through when they were young. Once she was sick, and he took her forty miles on muleback through the mountains. That cured her up. I tell you he's one of the finest old fellows you could find."
"But I don't know Mrs. Wilkinson," objected Clytie, in dismay, her colour coming and going ominously.
Langshaw waved his hand: "That's all settled. Wilkinson said himself that of course a woman would want an invitation from another woman, and he telegraphed details to his wife while I was there, for fear he might forget it later, he's so absent-minded. You'll get a night letter from her to-morrow morning. They live in a sort of palace, I judge, in Los Angeles, and they've any number of motors. He says his wife loves to have young people around her. Just the thing to do you worlds of good! Just imagine—you'll see the Rockies and the Grand Canyon! Wilkinson will be coming back in six weeks and he'll bring you with him then."
"Six weeks!" Clytie gasped. Her dark eyes grew larger; her small figure vibrated. "Joe Langshaw! I couldn't stay away for six weeks without you and the children—I couldn't! There's no use telling me to, I won't; I" She stopped weakly, under the force of his gaze, and buried her face in her hands.
"See here, Clytie, who's doing this?" said her husband masterfully. "You're going. I'm running this household now, and you're going to get well if I know it, dear. There, you cry for everything—that shows what a condition you're in. Will it do the children or me any good to have you stay home and die? Answer me that! Well, I should think not. You're going to come back so well and young and beautiful that I'll fall in love with you all over again. George, use your handkerchief or leave the room."
"You need a change more than I do," flashed Clytie, but perhaps his last words touched a faintly vibrating chord. In all brave and healthful natures there is a natural ardour of travel. Anticipation of the unusual waved, even if but for the moment, its wizard wand. The Rockies loomed largely in the conversation at dinner, while George and Mary clamoured loudly to go, too. Clytie's eyes followed her husband as if light dwelt in his presence. She couldn't have told that the idea of being sent away from him made her feel foolishly frightened, like a child being pushed off into the dark. But of course you would forget all that when you saw the Rockies.
That evening when they were alone they talked out everything exhaustively. Langshaw's mother would come and stay with the children, whom she adored. Langshaw loved to boss his mother, and she loved to be bossed by him. He wrote the letter at once and ran out and posted it.
As for a week being a short time in which to make one's preparations for a trip to California, a person could get ready for an absence of years in a day. For himself a half hour would suffice. Was money needed for the replenishment of her wardrobe, even though she at least had her best gown and a walking suit? Money would be forthcoming for what was necessary. If she couldn't go to town he would purchase for her.
They pored over timetables, looking up not only the train on which she would go but the one on which she would return, settling that Langshaw would leave the office to come up and meet her. In the midst of all this earnest consultation there were intermediate moments in which little Mary twice woke up for a drink of water, and Baby had to be covered, the furnace raked down, and the sturdy George, coughing croupily, given cough medicine, the first dose of which administered by Clytie's shaking hand delayingly, went outside his throat instead of in it, and necessitated the protested ignominy of a large bath towel stuffed inside his nightgear. Yet still the two talked on, engrossed, as they made ready for the night; only really coming back to the present just as they were ready, at a quarter of twelve, to turn out the light, by discovering that Minna, due in the house by half-past ten, hadn't come in yet. That furious, nerve-racking anger consequent on sitting up for a delinquent maid took possession of the spirit.
"By George, if she does this while you're away I'll send her kiting; that's all there is about it!" breathed Langshaw between his teeth.
"But, Joe, you couldn't, with the children and everything."
"I wouldn't let a little thing like that faze me," said Langshaw grandly. He was at the moment the embodiment of man, the dominant power, before whose gleaming axe strong forests crash down upon the sward. Minna's step was heard on the porch below.
"How did that business with Mr. Henkel get on to-day?" asked Clytie in a small voice, the last thing.
"All right!" answered her husband, in a final tone of such emphasis that any but a very stupid woman—and little, loving Clytie was never that—couldn't help knowing that it was all wrong, and she mustn't ask any more questions.
Langshaw felt that if he could only hold things together with Henkel until his wife got safely off, he could force all the powers of his freed mind to a satisfactory settlement of the situation in the days remaining to him, before the Philadelphia people would be called in. When Clytie got off he could see to everything.
III
The next week was, to the reminiscent mind, a crowded period of deadly earnestness and heroic strivings to accomplish the simplest, the most inane things. Clytie herself visibly wilted under the strain. 'Every time Langshaw looked at her, her unnaturally large eyes and translucent pallor goaded him to fresh effort in her behalf.
The first hitch came in a letter from his mother, tearfully announcing that she felt that she ought not to leave his sister Ella, who was in one of her nervous states at present; though her dearest boy knew how much, how very much, she longed to be with him and the darling children. Had Clytie tried eating apples? They were said to be very strengthening. Langshaw dropped the letter before he got to the end.
"Poor Mother!" he said, with a little grimace; "she always thinks that if she really wants to do a thing it must be wrong."
"Oh, she always sacrifices you to that selfish Ella," said Clytie, with sudden fierceness. After all Joe had done for his mother! "Well, of course I won't go now."
"Oh, yes, you will," said Langshaw firmly.
Cousin Helen, who had been a trained nurse and had made their house her headquarters whenever she came to town, was confidently called upon. In her keeping the children's health would be safeguarded. But Cousin Helen also Biblically prayed to be excused. She would love so much to help them out, but she was to receive at a tea on the following Monday, and the week after that she had engaged the dressmaker by the day. If Clytie could wait until March
That letter went in the waste basket.
"Well, as far as I can see there's nothing but to get Mrs. Mulger," said Langshaw grimly.
"Oh, Joe dearest! But you never could stand her for six weeks! Of course the children adore Mulgy, and it would help her out, but Joe, please let me stay home! You would be perfectly miserable with Mrs. Mulger. If you knew how I didn't want to go—Joe, please!"
"If you cry you'll make yourself ill;" he repeated the monotonous warning. "Mrs. Mulger isn't going to make any difference to me, I can tell you that."
Yet even he couldn't help wincing in secret at the prospect. Mrs. Mulger was a remarkably homely women in reduced circumstances—of elephantine proportions and a fawnlike timidity in the presence of man. She jumped when Langshaw spoke to her at the table; she scuttled out of his way impedingly when she met him on the stairs; she required with every breath the assurance that she wasn't annoying him. She engendered in Langshaw unsuspected sympathies with Nero.
But it proved that Mrs. Mulger could come.
Mr. Wilkinson, white-bearded, with his kind blue eyes and comforting air of all's well, dined with them one hurried evening; but apart from that the days were filled with that incredible sense of rush and seriousness of preparation, and with increasing small, wrenching expenditures.
Langshaw himself, taking precious time, shopped with his wife's illegible pencilled lists, earnestly purchasing from white-goods counters—usually outside the masculine province—with the expert help of salesladies, who were comfortingly sure his wife would like the articles; he had a dim impression that she didn't like those violently ribboned things. He bought stockings for her little feet—dear, dearest little feet, that used to dance so lightly! Once he suddenly choked at the thought of them. He bought her a blue felt hat with a red bow; he matched samples; but on one point he stood firm—he couldn't be brought to changing things. He haled the unwilling George and Mary to the dentist, at Clytie's anguished behest, on his precious Saturday afternoon; he listened morning and evening to increasing details as to what was to be put in the wash during her absence, and how many silver spoons there were to count, and what the children ought not to eat, and what was to be done under those hypothetical conditions that never happen. Every night when he came home—he had taken to walking with a slow, padding, panther-like step, as one who treads a jungle—he found the house full of loudly departing women, who had been helping Clytie with her wardrobe, and had each a moment of lowered, confidential speech with him to say how badly Clytie was looking and that he was getting her off just in time.
The children were underfoot everywhere. He had only one safety valve, in a letter which he wrote to a contractor who had mistakenly dumped a barrow-load of manure on his front walk. That letter was a masterpiece of stinging satire, of Jove-like invective, and of delicately insulting epigram. It was never sent, because he found on rising the next morning that the manure had been removed, but it had already filled its appointed place in the scheme of the universe. Langshaw had relieved his soul.
The day came at last, yet with a paralyzing reality, when Clytie stood with little Mary clinging to her, in the open doorway of her house, ready for departure, the blue hat with the scarlet ribbon crowning the dark tendrils of her lovely hair. Though it was seven o'clock it was still light. She was to be spared the fatigue of the journey to town and through it to the big station. Kind Mr. Wilkinson had sent an automobile for her; her small trunk and her bag were already in it. Langshaw stood ready to help her in as soon as Mrs. Mulger should appear to take charge; the straw-coloured Minna hovered smilingly in the background; neighbours on either side stood on their porches to wave her off cheerily. And at this ultimate moment there was an irritating failure to connect with the perfectly planned.
Mrs. Mulger sent word by a small boy that a visitor had arrived, and she hoped it wouldn't make any difference if she came the next morning instead of to-night.
"Not make any difference! Why, that's what we wanted—to have her here now," wailed Clytie, tearing up the letter wrathfully. "You ask people for your time and they come at theirs! I can't go if Mrs. Mulger isn't here!"
"Oh, yes, you can," said Langshaw, with patient reassurance. "She'll be here in the morning all right, and Minna will look after the children till I get back from the station. Come, say good-bye to little Mary."
"But George—where is George?"
Sure enough, where was George?
"George, George, where are you? George! Come at once and say good-bye to your mother!"
"I can't go without seeing George," sobbed Clytie.
"George! George!"
Hurrying neighbours rushed to search for the missing boy; garden and street resounded with shouts for George.
"Where is George Langshaw? His mother is waiting to say good-bye to him!"
"George Langshaw!" "Georgie!" "I saw him only a moment ago in Bournan's yard." "No, he isn't there." "Geor-ge Lang-shaw!" "George! George!"
Finally unearthed from somebody's rear premises, he was haled to the grasp of his father's hand, grown incredibly muddy since dinner, his yellow locks hanging over an encrusted cheek.
"How in the world did you ever get yourself so filthy? Stand up, sir, and kiss your mother good-bye. What do you mean by running off like this? Go in the house now and stay there till bedtime."
"Oh, Joe, please don't be cross to him now—please!"
"No, I won't—all right; but hurry up," he admonished her.
George's round face, masculinely sullen and defiant of emotional scenes, emerged from his mother's tearful embrace; his coat sleeve rubbed across the place where her lips had been while his eyes winked unwillingly. Perhaps his father had an inner sympathy with George.
Langshaw lifted his wife into the car, stepping in after her, slammed the door, and they sped with little Mary's sudden piercing shrieks following them:
"I want to go with my mother! I want to go with my mother! I want to go—to go—to go-o-o"
The ride was a silent one. They bumped and jarred and whizzed along barren roads, stuck fast in the traffic of streets. Night had come on when, after passing through the rows of lamps, they arrived at the big station and ensconced themselves in the white marble waiting room, with its long vistas, in which it seemed that a mere handful of pigmies were scattered. One of them, however, promptly turned out to be Mr. Wilkinson, while-bearded and bright-eyed, a slouch hat over his white hair and a coloured porter in tow carrying two enormous bags. Mr. Wilkinson had a kind homeliness in his manner that made everything seem natural and usual and for the best every way.
"Well, we're all here in time," he said congratulatorily. "My wife says I'm so absent-minded she's never sure of me unless she sees me! Now, Mrs. Langshaw, this little trip is going to do you a world of good. The only trouble is that your stay will be too short; you know you'll hardly get out there before you'll find yourself at home again."
"How long before the train starts?" Clytie asked.
"The gates won't be open for twenty minutes yet."
"Then I think you'd better go right home, Joe," Clytie implored her husband anxiously. "The children are all alone with Minna. As long as Mr. Wilkinson is here with the tickets perhaps he'll check my trunk, so that you can go right along. I'd rather, really! Please!"
"Very well," said Langshaw.
Their formal leavetaking, to the public eye, was brief; only he and she knew. Then he had left her.
Kind Mr. Wilkinson kept on talking for a few minutes, though Clytie didn't hear what he said, before he also hurried off—the porter with the bags still following him—to see to her luggage. It gave her an unexpectedly lost feeling to be left, even momentarily, alone with only the long cloak lying on the seat beside her and her suitcase to show that she actually belonged anywhere.
The station was very, very big and glittering and light; tired little Clytie was a large component part of a home, but here she was an unnoticed atom in the universe. Her thoughts flew desolately back with her husband to the house she had just quitted, filled with her dear ones, and brooded over them.
It began to seem as if Mr. Wilkinson were gone a long time. Perhaps he was having trouble in checking the trunks; but he must be all right; he would undoubtedly be there soon.
If a man were looking after you of course everything must be all right! But still he didn't come—it was getting very strange someway. She leaned forward, searching the oncoming groups with suddenly frightened eyes and beating heart; people stared at her. And still Mr. Wilkinson didn't come! Oh, this was too strange! She rose at last, and her eyes, as she turned, stared terror at a clock. Was that the time? Why, the train must be long gone! What had happened? No, perhaps he meant to take a later one—and still he did not come!
IV
The journey home seemed to take but a moment to Langshaw. He made connections; he slept in the train, stumbling out at the right station merely by instinct. But it took a strange effort to insert his key in the lock and enter the house that had been so alive with preparations a few hours before.
Already it wore a strange and almost nauseatingly alien look. A muddy rubber boot of George's lay at the foot of the stairs; his equally muddy overcoat lay on the floor in the library. He went upstairs to see that the sleeping children were all right, and woke the equally sleeping Minna, sitting by Baby. Clytie's dressing table was still in disorder as she had left it; his picture and those of the children were gone; a discarded red wrapper hung over the back of a chair and a worn little red Turkish slipper perched, toe up, on the bed.
Langshaw took off his coat and collar, and putting on his big woolly dressing gown went down to the chilly library. There was no oil in the lamp, but he turned up the gas, thrust a wad of newspapers under a couple of logs on the hearth, and touched a match to them, and, wheeling a big armchair in front of it, sat down with his pipe. His free hour had come at last. He could sit here all night, if he wanted to, and think things out and find some way that in the next few days might make his plans fit in with Henkel's.
Suddenly his eye fell on the dining table, visible through the wide doorway and usually bestowed neatly with a lace centrepiece and fern dish over its mahogany. Now, instead, the white cloth had been left from dinner, pulled untidily, and a couple of dishes remained on it.
If that was the way Minna intended to let things go! The thought lashed him to fury. When was it that little Mary was to take her cough medicine? And how many spoons were there? At the prospect of Mrs. Mulger on the morrow he realized, with a sort of terror, that his mind wasn't free at all; a thousand small, unwonted cares were lurking to invade it. Poor Langshaw felt, with a dull anger, that if a man had to earn a living he couldn't afford to be absorbed by such things; it was in a way an outrage that he should be expected to. The strain of the past weeks was telling on him disastrously, in spite of all his will power. After repeated efforts the wood on the hearth only sent up sporadic wreaths of smoke. The chill emptiness of the house made its way to the soul. He had insisted on Clytie's going; it was all his doing; but why had she gone? None but the one who is left ever knows what it is to be left. There is a rawness of solitude that invades the spirit that can never be told; in the after-comfort of the beloved presence the words for it are lost.
Langshaw tried in vain to imagine that his wife had just run out for an hour at a neighbour's. She seemed to have taken away a part of him with her—in homely parlance, he felt he wasn't "all there"; his working brain, that he had counted on so much, he saw with fear was dull, sodden, inert, with no helpful promise of being anything more under these conditions. That loudly ticking clock in the hall told him how few minutes had been ticked off from an absence that already seemed endless. Six weeks of this sort of thing! Oh, well, it would be different by to-morrow. Yet as eleven o'clock struck he felt as a man may who has gone blind, or as one who is just imprisoned—a life sentence to be gone through and those first two hours so long!
There is, in the daily married companionship of two people who love each other, an overtone that comes from the harmony of that love, independent of and diviner than the conscious efforts of either. It is the thing that cannot be reckoned on, cannot be formulated, cannot be explained, cannot be compelled. It is there or it is not; whether one is sad or lively, differing or agreeing, it ineffably ennobles and revives and inspires.
All discords melt into it, and without it married life is only a sordid struggle weighted down with stupid cares and disappointments, as truly dull as it seems to the eye of an outsider. With Clytie's bodily presence this intangible good, that alone made life worth living, had also departed.
Langshaw rose soberly after a while and went on his accustomed rounds, closing up the house. "Thank Heaven," he breathed, "to-morrow will be a working day"; and fancying that he heard someone fumbling with the knob of the front door, strode through the hall and opened it. Clytie—strangely altered, her hat rakishly atilt on her tumbled curls, her dark eyes glowing—stood on the threshold.
"You!" he cried. The sight of her, his touch on her arm, sent such a thrill of delicious surprise and unaccustomedness through both, as though they had been separated for years and intoxicatingly reunited, or as if she were his bride and he her husband of an hour, that they found themselves absurdly laughing; and then laughed and laughed increasingly for the sheer foolish happiness of the thing.
But at last they were seated, her hands in his, while she explained:
"I was so scared! I went round, looking. Then I found the porter who had carried Mr. Wilkinson's bags, and he said that Mr. Wilkinson had stopped to talk to another gentleman and after a while had said: 'Bless my soul, I'm so absent-minded I'll miss that train,' and then he hurried for it and the porter got him aboard just in time. Then I telephoned you twice and they said they couldn't get you."
"I was here all the time," protested Langshaw indignantly.
"Yes, of course, I knew that. Then I met Mr. Stanton, that nice Mr. Stanton you used to know. He'd just come back from somewhere. He wanted to know what you were doing. Well, he carried my bag, put me on the tube, and then I knew I was all right. I had to wait an hour for the last train out here."
"Stanton!" said Langshaw. And then again in a different tone: "Stanton!"
Happiness, the illuminator, struck a vivid flash across a suddenly clear and working brain. Well, why not? Why, of course! Not the way Henkel had intended, but No need to think of that now; it would keep. Clytie had found his man for him.
"But how about you, dear?" he asked.
"I'm coming to that. You needn't try to send me off again to strangers, for I'm not going," said Clytie. "I've been away miles and years! Do you know, Joe Langshaw, that I cried all night for four nights because you were sending me away? It nearly killed me. You sha'n't do it again. I'll be good; I won't sweep. I'll rest every day; I will, I will! I always knew I could get strong just as well at home. Well, I am willing now." Her lip trembled, but a smile shone through the dimness in her eyes. "Gracious, has Minna left that table-cloth on? I'll train her to-morrow!" Her voice changed again. "Oh, Joe, I need you so much—say you needed me, too!"
"Need a little bit of a wife like you!" said Langshaw, with tender scoffing. He rose and took up her wraps. "Do you know what time it is, Mrs. Langshaw? It's half-past one!"
The smouldering logs in the fireplace suddenly shot up a loudly crackling flame. The angel of a sense of humour had slipped into the house with Clytie, unfurling his amethystine wings, all iridescent, sparkling of gold and purple light, until they reached to the ceiling and spread out to the farthest corners of the room, filling all the dark places with little scintillating, dancing gleams. One of them touched Clytie's hair as Langshaw snatched her in his arms.