They picked up their lives where they had dropped them. They were content to wait for the fulness of their joy. He busied himself with food for her; he cooked, and she helped him; they talked of his affairs as if they had always been hers. Something stirred the practical side of him. She was to see him as near a man of the world as it was possible for him to be. It might have been a shock to her, but its simplicity was all his own. “I must see one person, and you must see one. I'll go to your father, and you shall tell Ingram what's going to happen. We don't owe him much, but there's that, I think. I've a great idea of treating the world with civility. The one thing it has worth having is its sense of manners. Let us have manners, then. Don't you think so?” He held her close as he spoke, and with a strange discrepancy between sight and sound, looked at her with dim eyes of love, before which she had to close down her own. To his, “Don't you think so?” she could only murmur without breath, “You mustn't love me so much--not yet, not yet!” but he pressed her the nearer and laughed his joy of her. “What! After eight years! And if I don't hold her very close, Mab, the tricksy sprite, may slip me.” Then he returned to his moralisings. “You'll see Ingram, my blessed one, don't you think?” She said gravely, with hard outlook upon the distant wold, “Yes, I must see him--” and then, with a sudden turn to him and a wondrous veil of tenderness upon her eyes, “You know that I think what you think from now onwards.” Their lips sealed the pact. He broke away at last. “Practice! Practice! Do let's be practical. Think of this. My house is yours until we marry; that can't be for a week.” A week! This was Senhouse practical. She blushed her answer. “What will you do? I mustn't turn you out.” He opened his arms wide to the airs of the down. “I sleep in the open. The stars for me. They shall see you wedded. Meanwhile, I shall wait upon you. But do let us be practical. We wait a week; we marry; but then what shall we do? Shall we reform the world? I think we shall do that in spite of ourselves; for if two people dare to be simple, there's no reason why two million shouldn't.” She lay at peace considering; her blue eyes, searching wonderfully into his, saw peace like a crown of stars. “I'll tell you what I should like to do,” she said. “I've thought about it this minute. It never occurred to me before, but I should like to teach better than anything in the world.”