He did not open his arms to her
or go a step nearer to her. His look was that of blank amazement, of
mingled remembrance and stark realisation. This was a turn of affairs
for which he had made no calculation. There had ever been the question
of his return to her, but never of her coming to him. Yet here she was,
debonnaire and fresh and perfectly appointed--and ah, so terribly neat
and spectacularly finessed! Here she was with all that expert formality
which, in the old days, had been a reproach to his loosely-swung life and
person, to his careless, almost slovenly but well-brushed, cleanly, and
polished ease--not like his wife, as though he had been poured out of a
mould and set up to dry. He was not tailor-made, and she had ever been
so exact that it was as though she had been crystallised, clothes and
all--a perfect crystal, yet a crystal. It was this very perfection, so
charming to see, but in a sense so inhuman, which had ever dismayed him.
"What should I be doing in the home of an angel!" he had exclaimed to
himself in the old home at Lammis.
Truth is, he ought never to have had such a feeling, and he would not
have had it, if she had diffused the radiance of love, which would have
made her outer perfectness mere slovenliness beside her inner charm and
magnetism.
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