His voice trembled a little in the effort to take it all as a matter of course, though hers did not; but then the novelty of environment was greater for him than for her.
"How long is it this time, Phil? I forget, and after all what does it matter? Come and see the roses, dear; there are such a lot out this morning."
He stopped her for an instant by drawing the hand he held towards him, and clasping it in both of his. "More roses than there were yesterday, Belle?" he asked with a sort of eager certainty in his tone.
She looked at him fondly. "Yes, more than yesterday "--then suddenly she laughed and laid her other hand on his. "I will say it, dear, since it pleases you. There are more roses to-day because you have come, and this is holiday-time."
Their welcome was over; they had stepped for a time into each other's lives. A ridiculous pretence, of course; a mere attempt to make imagination play the part assigned since all eternity to facts. But if it pleased these two, or if it pleases any number of persons who find facts are stubborn things, why should the world quarrel with it? Belle had once on a time made herself unnecessarily miserable by imagining that she and Philip were in love with each other, and that, since love was inextricably bound up with marriage or the desire for it, she must be posing as the heroine of the third-rate French novel. Her consequent loss of self-respect had very nearly spoiled her life, and even Philip had never ventured to think what might have happened had John lived to force them into action. The unreality of her past fears had come home to Belle, however, during the long months when she had waited for her last legacy. And with the first sight of the baby-face whereon Fate had set its mark of failure all too clearly, had come a resolution that in the future nothing but her own beliefs should rule her conduct. Her life and Philip's should not be spoiled by other people's ideas; her imagination should be her slave, not her master. So much, and more, she had said to Philip on that mirky day when in his first disappointment he had declared that he could not bear it. But that had been five years ago, and life seemed more than bearable as he walked round the garden with her hand drawn through his arm and held there caressingly. A man who is in command of a regiment in which he has served since he was a boy, whose heart is in his profession, whose career has been successful, has other interests in life besides marriage; if he has not, the less he figures as a hero, even in a novel, the better.