Simply and all quietly, as Nature sends her gifts, miracles moved toward completion while Miggy sewed. The impulse to do for him this trifling service was like a signal, and when she took up the needle for him I think that women whose hands had long lain quiet stirred within her blood. As for Peter--but these little housewifely things which enlighten a woman merely tease a man, who already knows their import and longs for all sweet fragments of time to be merged in the long possession.
Miggy gave the needle back to Peter and he took it--needle, red book, and hand.
"Miggy!" he said, and the name on his lips was like another name. And it was as if she were in some place remote and he were calling her.
She looked at him as if she knew the call. Since the world began, only for one reason does a man call a woman like that.
"What is it you want?" she said--and her voice was very sweet and very tired.
She may have tried to say something, but her voice trembled away.
"I thought it would be everything--your coming here to-day," Peter said. "I've wanted it and wanted it. And what does it amount to? Nothing, except to make me wild with wanting you never to go away. I dread to think of your leaving me here--shutting the door and being gone. If it was just plain wanting you I could meet that, and beat it, like I do the things down to the works. But it isn't that. It's like it was something big--bigger than me, and outside of me, and it gets hold of me, and it's like it asked for you without my knowing. I can't do anything that you aren't some of it. It isn't fair, Miggy. I want more of you--all of you--all the time, Miggy, all the time...."
I should have liked to see Miggy's face when she looked at Peter, whose eyes were giving her everything and were asking everything of her; but I was studying the sunset, glory upon glory, to match the glory here. And the singing of Little Child began again, like that of a little voice vagrant in the red west....
"Oh, I can see a playmate there, Far up in Splendour Town!"
"Peter, Peter!" she cried, "I couldn't--I never could bring us two on you to support."
Peter gave her hands a little shake, as if he would have shaken her. I think that he would have shaken her if it had been two or three thousand years earlier in the world's history.