She smiled like a tired child. She had a perception that something overpoweringly strange and sudden had happened, but she did not want to rouse herself just yet to think what it must all mean.
Two hours later, in the great drawing-room ablaze with light, Monica and Randolph stood together to welcome their guests. She had laid aside her mournful widow’s garb, and was arrayed in her shimmering bridal robes. Ah, how lovely she was in her husband’s eyes as she stood beside him now! Perhaps never in all her life had she looked more exquisitely fair. Happiness had lighted her beautiful eyes, and had brought the rose back to her pale cheeks: she was glorified—transfigured—a vision of radiant beauty.
He had changed but slightly during his mysterious year of absence. There were a few lines upon his face that had not been there of old: he looked like a man who had been through some ordeal, whether mental or physical it would be less easy to tell; but the same joy and rapture that emanated, as it were, from Monica was reflected in his face likewise, and only a keen eye could read to-night the traces of pain or of sorrow in that strong, proud, manly countenance.
Monica looked at him suddenly, the flush deepening in her cheeks.
“Hush! They are coming!” she said, and waited breathlessly.
The door opened, admitting Mrs. Pendrill, Beatrice, and Tom. There was a pause—a brief, intense silence, during which the fall of a pin might have been heard, and then, with one long, low cry, half-sobbing, half-laughing, Beatrice rushed across the room, and flung herself upon Randolph.
Monica went straight up to Mrs. Pendrill, and put her arms about her neck.
“Aunt Elizabeth, he has come home,” she said, in a voice that shook a little with the tumult of her happiness. “He has just come home—this very day—Randolph—my husband. Help me to believe it. You must help me to bear this—as you helped me to bear the other.”
Tom had by this time grasped Randolph by the hand; but neither trusted his own voice. They were glad that Beatrice covered their silence by her incoherent exclamations of rapture, and by the flow of questions no one attempted to answer.
It was all too like a dream for anyone to recollect very clearly what happened. Raymond and Haddon came in almost at once, new greetings had to be gone through. How the dinner passed off that night no one afterwards remembered. There was a deep sense of thankfulness and joy in every heart; yet of words there were few. But when gathered round the fire later on in the evening, when they had grown used to the presence amongst them of one whom they had mourned as dead for more than a year, Randolph was called upon to tell his tale, which was listened to in breathless silence.