"It's not such a place as I should like to ha' brought you to, Meg; but work's been slack, and--there, you know all that!"
Meg stepped in and looked around; her glance was shy and somewhat fearful. Should she be afraid to see what her young husband had prepared for her?
She clasped his hand tightly, and the firm pressure in return reassured her. Whatever it might be, love had done it from beginning to end.
For Meg had come out of the sweet country with its sunny meadows, and cowslips and buttercups. She had left, fifty miles away, the dear fragrant garden, where only this morning her mother had gathered such a posie as had never been seen before; she had left the cottage where every china mug and shepherdess was like a bit of her life; she had left the situation in the grand house at the end of her mother's garden, where she had lived for four years in the midst of every luxury. And this is what she had come to: two small rooms in a high London house, in one of the streets turning out of a wide but gone-down thoroughfare near London Bridge.
The rooms were on the second floor, and looked out front and back, and as her husband ushered her in and closed the door, she knew she had come home.
He led her to the fire, where already a kettle was singing blithely, placed there in readiness by some one as yet unknown to Meg, and then he put his arm round her and whispered,
"Does it all seem very different to what you thought, my dear?"
"Oh, no," said Meg, leaning against his shoulder and looking round; "it's ever so nice. And how could you think of all these things by yourself, Jem?"
He laughed nervously, and her glance continued to take in all the things one by one. The little chiffonier which he had bought at a second-hand shop with such pride, because Meg's mother had one just like it; the bright-burning grate, with its little oven and boiler; the two American arm-chairs, looking so inviting by it; the large rag hearthrug, the strips of clean carpet on each side of the table, the red table-cloth, the freshly-scrubbed shelves, on which quite an array of pretty new crockery was set out.
Yes, it was home. Meg looked up in her husband's face with a satisfied glance.
"It is beautiful," she said, taking possession of it all with her heart. Hers and his, their home, for as long as God willed it.