Jane came in, smiling, with the new _entrée_ dish in her hands. Tom watched it with gleeful eyes, and assisted to place it on the table. It was his little surprise for me--mushrooms, to which I am extravagantly partial--the first of the season. He had gone to Melbourne the day before to buy them, and it was her absorption in the task of cooking them delicately which had caused Jane to neglect the porridge--Tom's first course at every breakfast. "There" said he, as he lifted the shining lid. He was as pleased as a boy with his plot and its _dénouement._ "Oh, you _precious!_" I responded; and the gratitude he expected brought tears to my eyes. "No one _ever_ had such a husband as mine!" He beamed complacently, and sat down beside me, inconveniently close. With his arm round my waist, he helped me to pour out the coffee, and spilled it on the cloth; he fed me with the best of the mushrooms and morsels of beef steak, and wiped gravy from my lips with his own napkin. He seemed to feel that I needed some extra comfort to make up for the children's absence, though he said repeatedly that it was only fitting we should have our wedding-day, whether gold, silver, or pewter, to ourselves. "As for you," he said, "I declare you don't look a day older than when I married you, Polly. Oh, well, a little fuller in the figure, perhaps; but that's an improvement. Old Saunders is quite right--you can beat the young girls still." I told him he could beat the young men in the making of pretty speeches, and I pretended not to believe his flatteries; but I knew that he meant every word he said, being the sincerest of men. And my spirits rose by leaps and bounds, until I felt even younger than I looked, and like a real bride once more, just as if those strenuous intermediate years had dropped out of the calendar. The barometer was rising too. Before we had finished our mushrooms the rain had all passed off, and the sun was shining on a clean and fragrant earth. Everything outside glittered and shimmered. It was a thoroughly bridal morning, after all. "And now, what shall we do?" my husband inquired, having lit his pipe and taken a rapid glance over the newspaper. "We must do something to celebrate the day. What shall it be?" "It doesn't much matter what, so long as we do it together," was my reply. "But I think I should like to go out somewhere, shouldn't you? It is going to be the perfection of weather." "Oh, we'll go out, of course. We'll have a day's sight-seeing, and our lunch in town. Let's see"--we studied the "Amusements" column, as we had so often seen the children do--"there's the Cyclorama; we have never seen the Cyclorama yet, and I'm told it's splendid." "And it is years since we were at the Picture Gallery," I remarked. "There must be dozens of pictures there that we have never seen."