"I want to feel that there is one place where we can be together," he said, "whenever we want to be together, sure of being always undisturbed. It won't matter how full the house is, nor how much bustle and business goes on, if we can keep this nest for ourselves, to come to when we are tired and when we want to talk. It is not your boudoir, you know--that is in another place--and it is not your morning room; it is a little sanctuary apart, where nobody is to be allowed to set foot, save our own two selves and the housemaid." "It shall be," said his wife, with kindling eyes. "I will take care of that." "Very well. That is a bargain. We will take possession to-night. We will inaugurate our occupation by having our tea here. You shall not be fatigued by sitting up to dinner--you shall have a Myrtle Street tea, and I will wait on you." She was placed in a deep arm-chair, beside a hearth whereon burned the first wood fire that she had seen since she left Australia--billets of elm-wood split from the butts of dead and felled giants that had lived their life out on the Yelverton acres--with her feet on a rug of Tasmanian opossum skins, and a bouquet of golden wattle blossoms (procured with as much difficulty in England as the lilies of the valley had been in Australia) on a table beside her, scenting the room with its sweet and familiar fragrance. And here tea was brought in--a dainty little nondescript meal, with very little about it to remind her of Myrtle Street, save its comfortable informality; and the servant was dismissed, and the husband waited upon his wife--helping her from the little savoury dishes that she did not know, nor care to ask, the name of--pouring the cream into the cup that for so many years had held her strongest beverage, dusting the sugar over her strawberries--all the time keeping her at rest in her soft chair, with the sense of being at home and in peace and safety under his protection working like a delicious opiate on her tired nerves and brain.