Rossiter took Clare upstairs to help her to take her hat off.
Mother and daughter faced one another--Clare flung herself into her
mother's arms.
"Oh! Mother dear, he's wonderful, wonderful!"
Downstairs Alice watched Peter critically. She had not realised until this
marriage, how fond she had grown of Peter. She had, for him, very much the
feeling that Bobby had--a sense of tolerance and even indulgence for all
tempers and morosities and morbidities. She had seen him, on a day, like a
boy of eighteen, loving the world and everything in it, having, too, a
curious inexperience of the things that life might mean to people, unable,
apparently, to see the sterner side of life at all--and then suddenly that
had gone and given place to a mood in which no one could help him, nothing
could cheer him... like Saul, he was possessed with Spirits.
Now, as he stood there, he looked not a day more than eighteen. Happiness
filled him with colour--his eyes were shining--his mouth smiling.
"Alice, old girl--she's splendid. I couldn't have believed that life could
be so good--"
A curious weight was lifted from her at his words. She did not know what
it was that she had dreaded. Perhaps it had been merely a sense that Clare
was too young and inexperienced to manage so difficult a temperament as
Peter's--and now, after all, it seemed that she had managed it.
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