"Oh!" she said, and held out a hand with a slightly nervous laugh. "I never expected to see you. Why didn't you tell me?" "I was coming to the station to meet you," he said, "but the cart went away fairly loaded. I have been sitting here waiting for you for the past two days. What do you suppose I meant, you dense little thing, when I advised you to take your holiday here? Do you think I'd have left you to wander alone among the musty relics you dreaded? ... I am going to take you to-morrow morning to see the sun rise," he added in a lighter tone. Esme laughed happily. "I haven't seen the sun rise since the last time we saw it together," she said, and scrutinised him for the first time with unwavering eyes. She thought him looking extremely well and fit. He appeared younger and altogether more sure of himself. And the stoop of the shoulders was less noticeable; he carried himself better. He met her eyes and smiled. "I rather suspected your early morning activity was a cultivation," he said. "It is possible, I have found, to discard habits as well as to cultivate them." That was the only reference he made to the long months he had spent fighting his baser self. He did not know whether she caught the drift of his remark. It did not seem to him to matter much. There was manifestly very little need for explanations on either side. They took one another for granted. They took their love for one another for granted; it stood revealed, a thing which needed no words, which expressed itself mutely in their satisfaction in one another. They gazed into each other's eyes, and there was no shadow of doubt in their minds at all. "You are looking well," she said. "Yes," he said; "I feel well. I feel amazingly, extravagantly well. So do you. You're radiant. That's because we are feeling so extremely pleased, both of us, with life and with ourselves,--particularly with ourselves. We are going to have the best of times together. I have been looking forward to this for months. And now you're here... It is almost as if we had never parted. It's better, really; the break brings us nearer. It's just good." The happiness which she felt shone in her face. She looked about her at the familiar little garden, at the homely comfortable hotel, and the small stoep in front of the house, where John and Mary waited, John seated on the steps with his precious suit-case beside him. Then she looked back into the man's face, and her eyes were grave and tender when they met his. "I had forgotten the children," she said. He glanced over his shoulder. "The little chap with the suit-case," he said. "And the girl--yes. Who are they?" She explained them. "I brought them with me to keep away the ghosts," she said. He laughed.