She saw now, that that had been just enough.  She couldn’t help him out of his intellectual quandaries—­yet.  But under the discouragement and lassitude of defeat, couldn’t she help him?  She remembered how many times she had gone to him for help like that.  In panicky moments when the new world she had been transplanted into seemed terrible to her; in moments when she feared she had made hideous mistakes; and, most notably, during the three or four days of an acute illness of her mother’s, when she had been brought face to face with the monstrous, incredible possibility of losing her, how she had clung to him, how his tenderness had soothed and quieted her—­how his strength and steady confidence had run through her veins like wine!

He had never come to her like that.  She knew now it was a thing she had unconsciously longed for.  And to-night she’d have a chance!  Oddly enough, it turned out to be the happiest day she’d known in a long while.  There was a mounting excitement in her, as the hours passed—­a thrilling suspense.  Perhaps, after all, it wasn’t going to be necessary to grind through all those law-books in order to win the place beside him that she wanted.  If she could comfort him—­mother him in his defeat and discouragement—­hold him fast when his world reeled around him, that would be the basis of a better companionship than mere ability to chop legal logic with him.  She could he content with the shallow sparkle of the stream of their life together, if it deepened, now and then, into still pools like this.

She resisted the impulse to call him up on the telephone, and a stronger one to go straight to him at his office.  She’d wait until he came home to her.  She had been feeling wretched lately—­headachy, nervous, sickish;—­probably, she thought, from staying in the house too much and bending over her heavy law-books.  Perhaps she had strained her eyes.  But to-day these discomforts were forgotten.  Every little while she straightened up and stood at an open window drawing in long breaths.  He should see her at her best to-night—­serene—­triumphant.  The pallor of her cheeks he had commented on lately, shouldn’t be there to trouble him.

For two hours that afternoon, she listened for his latch-key, and when at last she heard it she stole down the stairs.  He didn’t shout her name from the hall, as he often did.  He didn’t hear her coming, and she got a look at his face as he stood at the table absently turning over some mail that lay there.  He looked tired, she thought.

He saw her when she reached the lower landing, but for just a fraction of a second his gaze left her and went back to the letter he held in his hand, as if to satisfy himself it was of no importance before he tossed it away.  Then he came to meet her.

“Oh!” he said.  “I thought you were going to be off somewhere with Frederica this afternoon.  It’s been a great day.  I hope you haven’t spent the whole of it indoors.  You’re looking great, anyway.  Come here and give me a kiss.”