He looked at Ingeborg and smiled. "Picture it," he said. "The only solace I have now had for two months and a half has been in the bony arms of my laboratory. I grow weary of them. It is well to have one's little wife home again. A man, to do his work, needs his life complete, equipped in each of its directions. His laboratory seems bony to him if he has not also a wife; his wife would seem not bony enough if he had not also a laboratory. Bony and boneless, bony and boneless--it is the swing of the pendulum of the wise man's life." And he bent over her and lifted her face up again by putting his finger under her chin. "Is it not so, Little One?" he asked, smiling. "I--suppose so," said Ingeborg. "Suppose so!" He laughed, and pulled an escaping tendril of her hair, and went away in great contentment and immersed himself very happily in the saucers of new grain waiting to be weighed and counted. It was a fine August afternoon, and his windows were open, for there was no wind to blow his papers about, and he was pleased when he presently became aware out of the corner of an eye withdrawn an instant from its work that his wife had come out on to the path below and was walking up and down it in the way she used to before the acuter period of the sofa and the interest in life beyond the grave had set in. He liked to see her there. There was a grass bank sloping up from the path to beneath his windows, and by standing on tip-toe on the top of this and stretching up an arm as far as it would go one was just able to tap against the glass. He remembered how she used to do this when first they were married, on very fine days, to try to lure him out from his duties into dalliance with her among the lilacs. It amused him to find himself almost inclined to hope she would do it now, for it was long since there had been dalliance and he felt this was an occasion, this restoration to normality, on which some slight trifling in a garden would not be inappropriate. But Ingeborg, though she loitered there nearly half an hour, did not even look up. She wandered up and down in the cool shade the house threw across the path in the afternoon, her hat off, apparently merely enjoying the beauty of a summer day bending towards its evening, and presently he forgot her in the vivid interest of what he was doing; so that it was the surprised expression of some one who has forgotten and is trying to recall that he looked at her when, after a knock at the door which he had not heard, he saw her come in and stand at the corner of his table waiting till he had done counting--a process he conducted aloud--to the end of the row of grains he was engaged upon.