"I shall bend to 'the higher criticism,' do my best to impress Miss Lewis," he declared with assumed gayety.
Then Isabel exclaimed as the door to their spacious sitting-room flew open. The place was a bower of roses. "Did you tell them to do it?" she asked.
Philip forgot a passing shadow and smiled an affirmative answer.
"It is lovely! the loveliest room I was ever in," she declared. "How dear of you." Philip stopped by the window, enjoying his wife's girlish joy. She sank her face into every separate bunch of flowers. "Oh, these dear, dear pink ones!" she cried.
American Beauties nodded above her head, and she stood on a footstool to inhale their fragrance. On a round table covered with a white cloth was a huge bowl of "bride roses," fitting emblem for the day. Philip's surprise had been perfect. The delicate forethought which had ordered her bower, which stipulated for the little dinner to be served in the sitting-room, away from curious eyes, touched her beyond words. Her husband was indeed a lover! She ran to him with outstretched arms. As never before she knew the depth of a long-denied moment. And later, when she laid aside her coat and hat, to sit at the first little dinner alone,--but for the deferential waiter coming in and going out,--she kept thinking of all that they had in store, of their happiness to come.
Philip was never as gay, never so like the boy of years back--the boy who had loved the girl. Both were beginning over again and time between had taught them the price of joy.
"On this night we toast each other," said Philip, lifting his glass. "There is just 'one cold bottle' for our 'little hot bird'! I drink to my wife!"
His eyes glowed. Isabel touched his glass with her own. "To the dearest husband in the whole big world!" she responded, then kissed him. He held her away from him, feasting on her beauty. But she begged for freedom, and took her place at the opposite side of the table. "We must behave," she cautioned. "He's coming! I hear him down the hall."
"I will be circumspect," Philip promised. "But I'm losing my appetite. I don't feel glad of salad and the rest. Let's fire him before the coffee; I want to sip mine with my wife on my knee."
"For shame!" she chided, as the waiter tapped the door, with a loaded tray. "Do seem to be hungry. If we send things back untouched we shall be the talk of the hotel kitchen." Laughter was a natural part of the little dinner. "It is just like playing party," she declared, when the man again disappeared.