Beyond that mysterious portal the small living room was very spick and span. Almost to his surprise he found Melia there. She matched the room in appearance and at the moment he came in she was putting a log of wood on the fire. Great Uncle William's sword and accouterments, hanging from the wall, were decorated with holly, the pictures also and a new grocer's almanac, and a small bunch of mistletoe was suspended from the gas bracket in the middle of the ceiling. Everything was far more cheerful and homelike than he ever remembered to have seen it. The note of Christmas was there, which in itself meant welcome and good cheer. He stood at the threshold of the curtained door, a neat soldierlike figure with a chastened mustache, looking wonderfully trim and erect in his uniform. She greeted him with a kind of half smile on her hard sad face, but he didn't offer to kiss her. Not for long years had they been on those terms; they were man and wife in hardly more than name. And if in his absence, as there was reason to suspect, she had played him a trick in revenge for her years of disappointment, he somehow felt man enough at that moment to make an end of things altogether so far as she was concerned. There were faults on both sides, no doubt. Perhaps he hadn't quite played jannock; but if the business now belonged to somebody else, he would simply walk straight out of the place and he would never enter it again. She stood looking at him, as if she expected him to speak first. But he didn't know what to say to her, with that doubt in his mind. Braced by the stern discipline which he felt already had made him so much more a man than he had ever been in his life, he had come home fully prepared to make a fresh start. In spite of her embittered temper, he had not lost quite all his affection for her. He was the kind of man who craves for affection; absence and hardship had made him realize that. He had looked forward to this homecoming, not merely as a relief from the grind of military routine, which galled him at times so that he could hardly bear it, but as an assertion of the manhood, of the husbandhood, that had long been overdue. "Evenin', Melia," he said at last. "Evenin', Bill," as she spoke she dropped her eyes. "Happy Christmas to you." Somehow his voice sounded much deeper than ever before. "Same to you. Bill." There was almost a softness in the fall of the words that took his mind a long way back. "How goes it?" Her reception was thawing him a little in spite of himself, but he hesitated about taking off his overcoat. If this fair seeming was intended to mask a blow there was only one way to meet it. There was a pause and then he took the plunge. "Business good?" He held himself ready for the consequences. "Pretty fair." The tone told nothing. "Seems to be that," he said mordantly. "Had a coat o' paint, I see, outside." He steeled himself again. "Had a new window put in an' all." She nodded.