He wrote giving the permission she asked, and made the discovery that his house looked empty and that a fortnight was long. He paced the garden in the hot evenings, smoking beneath the lime-trees where he and she at the beginning used so gaily to breakfast, and forgot how slow of movement and mind she had been for several years, how little he had really seen of her, how more and more his attitude towards her had been one of patience; and when he went in to his supper, which he suddenly did not like and criticised, what he found himself looking for was not the figure he had been used to find lying silent on the sofa, but the quick, light, flitting thing that laughed and pulled his ears, the Ingeborg of the beginning, his little sheep. On the day she came home, although it was the very height of harvesting and the first samples of the year's grain lay on his table waiting to be examined, he gave up the afternoon to driving in to Meuk to meet her, and waited on the platform with an impatient expectancy he had not felt for years. "It is not good for man to live alone," were his first words as he embraced her largely in the door of the railway carriage, while the porter, in a fever to get out the hand luggage and run and attend to other passengers, had to wait till he had done. "Little sheep, how could you stay away so long from the old shepherd?" She was looking very well, he thought--sunburnt and with many new freckles, rounder, quite young, a sweet little wife for a long solitary husband to have coming home to him. He lifted her proudly into the carriage and drove through Meuk with his arm round her, waving the other one at the doctor who rallied past them in his own high shaky vehicle and shouting, "Cured!" The doctor, however, seemed surprised at seeing Ingeborg, and did not smile back but looked inscrutably at them both. She asked about the welfare of the children, and whether their ears had been properly washed. "Ears?" exclaimed Herr Dremmel. "And what, pray, have the ears of others to do with a reunited wedded couple?" She hoped, a little hurriedly, that Rosa and the cook had been good to him. "Rosa and the cook?" he cried. "What talk is this of Rosa and the cook? If you are not silent with your domesticities I will kiss you here and now in the middle of the open highroad." She said she had never really thanked him for letting her go to Zoppot and be there so long. "Too long, Little One," he interrupted, drawing her closer. "Almost had I forgotten what a dear little wife I possess." "But I'm going to make up for it all now," she said, "and work harder than I've ever done in my life." "At making the good Robert happy," he said, pinching her ear. "And doing things for the children. Dreadful to think of them all this time without me. Were they good?" "Good as fishes." "Robert--fishes?" "They are well, Little One, and happy. That is enough about the children. Tell me rather about you, how you filled up your days."