"There isn't any more, only I think that must have been the life I lived in my last incarnation, because a little house in the country--any little house, even an old turnpike cottage--always seems to call out to me, 'Here I am! Come home! What a long time you've been away!'"
"And yet," he said, and felt, as he said it, how stupid he was being--"and yet you love traveling and adventure--seeing the world and the wonders of the world."
"Ah!" she said, "that's my new incarnation. But what the old one loved goes deeper than that. I love adventure and new bits of the world as I love strawberries and ice-cream, and waltzing and Chopin, but the little house in the green country is like the daily bread of the heart."
"I understand you," he said, slowly. "I understand you in the only possible way. I mean that's the way I feel about it, too. If you were really my sister, what a united family the last of the Basingstokes would be."
"Do you really feel the same about it--you, too?" she asked. "Oh, what a pity I wasn't born Basingstoke, and we would have lived on our own farm and been happy all our lives."
He would not say what he might have said, and her heart praised him for not saying it. And so at last they came to Warwick, and Charles had bounded from the dog-box all pink tongue and white teeth and strenuous white-covered muscles, and knocked down a little boy in a blue jersey, who had to be consoled by chocolate which came out of the machine like the god in the Latin tag. And then all the luggage was retrieved--there was getting to be a most respectable amount of it, as she pointed out--and it and they and Charles got into a fly (for there are still places where an open carriage bears that ironic name) and drove through the afternoon sunshine to the Warwick Arms. But when they were asked to write their names in the visitors' book, each naturally signed a Christian name, and the management, putting two and two together, deduced Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke, and entered this result in more intimate books, living in retirement in the glass case which preserves the young lady who knows all about which rooms you can have. The chambermaid and the boots agreed that Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke were a handsome couple. Also, when a new-comer, signing his name, asked a question about the signatures just above his, "Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke," was the answer he got.