The Duchess found him that best of all things--very much of a man, and knew that he was hers. And he, more wild with love for her than suffering physical pain, found her a woman and knew that she loved him and that she was his. The house, so deserted and desolate an hour ago, grew fresh, warm, and rosy as over the west meadows the sunset, gilding the wall and The Dials, flushed the windows red, and the deserted bird's-nest, lately "filled with snow" appeared to have, as the light rained upon it, filled itself with roses. So, an hour later, it seemed to Bulstrode, when he came and found it housing the lovers. THE EIGHTH ADVENTURE VIII IN WHICH HE COMES INTO HIS OWN England, the heart of the countryside, freshened by December and drifted over by delicate breaths that are scarcely fog, and through which like a chrysanthemum seen behind ground glass the sun contrives to shine, the English country in December is one thing, London quite another. Jimmy wandered across from Paddington to his destination, part of the time on foot, part of the time peering from a crawling hansom in immediate peril of collision with every other object that like himself lost bearings in the nightmarish yellow fog. He fetched up before No. ----, Portman Square, at mid-day, and rang the door bell of Lady Sorgham's town-house, and in his eagerness to find his friend did not ask himself how the time accorded with calling hours. She was at home. An insignificant footman told him this, and the gentleman reflected that it was astounding what the words, heard often in the course of ten years, meant to him still. In the sitting-room, before a coal fire, a writing table at her side, a pen in her hand, he found Mrs. Falconer. He sincerely struggled with an inability to speak at once, even the consoling how-d'-dos that cover for us a multitude of feelings, were not at his tongue's end. The fire had burned away a few feet of fog and lighted lamps and candles shone pallidly through an obscurity about whose existence there could be no doubt. The inmates of Lady Sorgham's thoroughly English and thoroughly comfortable drawing-room were aliens, possessing neither of them a hearthstone within range of several thousand miles. But no sooner had they greeted--Bulstrode triumphantly peering at her through both real and mental haze--shaken hands, and each found a seat before the grate, than an enchanting homeliness overspread the place. Bulstrode felt it and smiled with content to think she did as well, and remembered an occasion in America when they had both of them missed a train for some out-of-the-way place and found themselves side by side in a mid-country station to pass there three hours of a broiling afternoon. The flies and mosquitoes buzzed about them, the thermometer registered ninety degrees, but happy, cool and unruffled Mary Falconer, smiling up at him from her hard bench, had said: "Jimmy, let's _build_ here!"