The way she echoed the word set him thinking.  But before his thoughts had got to their destination she said: 

“Shall we make it a real honeymoon, Roddy—­make it as complete as we can?  Forget everything and let all the world be ...”

He supplied a word for her, “Rose-color?”

She accepted it with a caressing little laugh, “... for a while?”

“That’s what I was fumbling for,” he said, “but I can’t think very straight to-night.  I’ve got it now, though.  That cottage we had—­before the twins were born—­down on the Cape.  There won’t be a soul there this time of the year.  We’d have the world to ourselves.”

“Yes,” she said, “for a little while, we’d want it like that.  But after a while—­after a day or two, could we have the babies?  Could the nurse bring them on to me and then go straight back, so that I could have them—­and you, altogether?”

He said, “You darling!” But he couldn’t manage more than that.

A little later he suggested that they could get the place by telegraph and could set out for it to-morrow.

She laughed and asked, “Will you let me be as silly as I like for once?  Will you give me a week—­well, till Saturday; that would do—­to get ready in?”

“Get ready?” he echoed.

“Clothes and thinks,” she said.  “A—­trousseau, don’t you see?  I’ve been so busy making clothes for other people that I’ve got just about nothing myself.  And I’d like ...  But I don’t really care, Roddy.  I’ll go with you to-morrow, ‘as is,’ if you want me to.”

“No,” he said.  “We’ll do it the other way.”

And then he took her back to the gray brick entrance and, just out of range of the elevator man, kissed her good night.

“But will you telephone to me as soon as you wake up in the morning, so that I’ll know it’s true?”

She nodded.  Then her eyes went wide and she clung to him.

“Is it true, Roddy?  Is it possible for a thing to come back like that?  Are we really the old Rodney and Rose, planning our honeymoon again?  It wasn’t quite three years ago.  Three years next month.  Will it be like that?”

“Not like that, perhaps,” he said, “exactly.  It will be better by all we’ve learned and suffered since.”

CHAPTER V

THE BEGINNING

There was a sense in which this prediction of Rodney’s about their honeymoon was altogether true, They had great hours—­hours of an emotional intensity greater than any they had known during that former honeymoon, greater by all they had learned and suffered since—­hours that repaid all that suffering, and could not have been captured at any smaller price.  There were hours when the whole of their two selves literally seemed transfused into one essence; when there was nothing of either of them that was not the other; when all their thoughts, impulses, desires, flowered spontaneously out of a common mind.  There was no precalculating these experiences.  They came upon them, seized them, carried them off.