Chapter 30 - Page 2

and put to bed. She suggested that he
should meanwhile take the bags to the hotel, and promised to
join him as soon as Geordie was asleep.

She was a long time coming, but waiting for her was sweet, even
in a deserted hotel reading-room insufficiently heated by a
sulky stove; and after he had glanced through his morning's
mail, hurriedly thrust into his pocket as he left Paris, he sank
into a state of drowsy beatitude. It was all the maddest
business in the world, yet it did not give him the sense of
unreality that had made their first adventure a mere golden
dream; and he sat and waited with the security of one in whom
dear habits have struck deep roots. In this mood of
acquiescence even the presence of the five Fulmers seemed a
natural and necessary consequence of all the rest; and when Susy
at length appeared, a little pale and tired, with the brooding
inward look that busy mothers bring from the nursery, that too
seemed natural and necessary, and part of the new order of
things.

They had wandered out to a cheap restaurant for dinner; now, in
the damp December night, they were walking back to the hotel
under a sky full of rain-clouds. They seemed to have said
everything to each other, and yet barely to have begun what they
had to tell; and at each step they took, their heavy feet
dragged a great load of bliss.

In the hotel almost all the lights were already out; and they
groped their way to the third floor room which was the only one
that Susy had found cheap enough. A ray from a street-lamp
struck up through the unshuttered windows; and after Nick had
revived the fire they drew their chairs close to it, and sat
quietly for a while in the dark.

Their silence was so sweet that Nick could not make up his mind
to break it; not to do so gave his tossing spirit such a sense
of permanence, of having at last unlimited time before him in
which to taste his joy and let its sweetness stream through him.
But at length he roused himself to say: "It's queer how things
coincide. I've had a little bit of good news in one of the
letters I got this morning."

Susy took the announcement serenely. "Well, you would, you
know," she commented, as if the day had been too obviously
designed for bliss to escape the notice of its dispensers.

"Yes," he continued with a thrill of pardonable pride. "During
the cruise I did a couple of articles on Crete--oh, just travel-
impressions, of course; they couldn't be more. But the editor
of the New Review has accepted them, and asks for others. And
here's his cheque, if you please! So you see you might have let
me take the jolly room downstairs with the pink curtains. And
it makes me awfully hopeful about my book."

He