He was a thinner, browner person than she remembered. His hair had more grey in it and there was a whitish scar above his left eyebrow. The scar was not recent, but she had never seen it before. His features were what they had always been, but somehow his air was different. This scarcely seemed to be the person she had been thinking of only a moment ago. But before she could be disappointed, or awkward, or any of the things she had feared she would be when he at last came home, he looked around the room with a quick, half-ironic glance that she knew in an instant. Then he looked at her with the most familiar smile in the world and said, “I’m home.”

* * *

The next morning they still had not said a hundredth part of all they had to tell each other.

“Sit there,” said Strange to Arabella.

“In this chair?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“So that I may look at you. I have not looked at you for three years and I have long felt the lack of it. I must supply the deficiency.”

She sat down, but after a moment or two she began to smile. “Jonathan, I cannot keep my countenance if you stare at me like that. At this rate you will have supplied the deficiency in half an hour. I am sorry to disappoint you, but you never did look at me so very often. You always had your nose in some dusty old book.”

“Untrue. I had entirely forgotten how quarrelsome you are. Hand me that piece of paper. I shall make a note of it.”

“I shall do no such thing,” said Arabella, laughing.

“Do you know what my first thought upon waking this morning was? I thought I ought to get up and shave and breakfast before some other fellow’s servant took all the hot water and all the bread rolls. Then I remembered that all the servants in the house were mine and all the hot water in the house was mine and all the bread rolls were mine too. I do not think I was ever so happy in my life.”

“Were you never comfortable in Spain?”

“In a war one is either living like a prince or a vagabond. I have seen Lord Wellington – his Grace, I should say9 – sleeping under a tree with only a rock for a pillow. At other times I have seen thieves and beggars snoring upon feather-beds in palace bed-chambers. War is a very topsy-turvy business.”

“Well, I hope you will not find it dull in London. The gentleman with the thistle-down hair said that once you had tasted war, you were sure to be bored at home.”