CHAPTER XVIII
HOW DINAH SAID ‘YES’
Rex Basire, meanwhile, counted manfully on. A hundred-and-ten from the corner scroll to the first line of blue; and seventy-six, either way, of grounding. Emboldened by success, he insisted upon filling in the yellow heart of a single forget-me-not. ‘Just as a souvenir!’ he pleaded, contriving to get through the task cleverly enough. A twelvemonth hence, when half the world lay between them, he thought Mrs. Arbuthnot might look at the centre of this forget-me-not, and remember to-day!
‘I shall remember a length of filoselle wasted. Your lordship’s stitches must be picked out at once—they are worked the wrong way of the silk.’ Taking back the needle and canvas, Dinah began to put her threat into instant execution. ‘A twelvemonth hence,’ she added, ‘I hope to be looking at something more interesting than wool-work. Most of my pieces get stored away, for no one in particular. This ottoman is for my Aunt Susan in Cambridgeshire. It will be a great set-off to her front parlour,’—Dinah admitted this with a tinge of artist’s pride; ‘but I am not likely to see it there. We have not been to Cheriton for four years, and——’
‘Happy Aunt Susan!’ exclaimed Lord Rex, who was wont to be a little impudent without awakening anger. ‘What would I give to have—not an ottoman for my front parlour—but something modest, a kettle-holder with an appropriate motto, say, worked for me by fair and charitable fingers!’
‘By your favourite sister’s, perhaps.’
Dinah’s voice was cold and clear as ice as she offered the suggestion.
‘You are in an unkind mood, Mrs. Arbuthnot. So unkind,’ Lord Rex took up a pair of scissors, and regarded them solemnly, as though they had been the shears of fate, ‘that I feel, beforehand, you mean to say “No” to everything I ask. I told you, did I not, that I had come to put a weighty matter into your hands?’
‘Do nothing of the kind, my lord. I am unused to receiving favours from a stranger. Your flowers are very beautiful’—with a touch Dinah placed the bouquet two or three inches farther from her—‘and I daresay your lordship meant it kindly to bring them. That is enough! I live quite retired, and——’
Stopping short, Dinah coloured violently. At this moment she heard Gaston’s tread as he ran down the outer stone staircase. She knew that she was left alone with Rex Basire for just as long as Rex Basire might think fit to stay.
‘But we hope to win a favour from you. The subalterns of the regiment are getting up a party for Wednesday, and we want to know if you will condescend to play hostess for us? We mean to be original,’ Lord Rex hurried on, not giving Dinah time to speak and refuse. ‘Instead of having a humdrum dance or dinner on terra-firma, we mean to charter a yacht—the Princess, now lying in Guernsey harbour—and carry all the nicest-looking people in the island out to sea.’
Dinah’s eyes gave him a look of momentary but severe disapproval.
‘For this a hostess is imperatively needed. Chaperonage, in its most venerable form, we can command. I’ve been spending the forenoon, I give you my word I have, in paying court to old ladies. Miss Tighe smiles on our project. The Archdeaconess does not frown. Of course we have Mrs. Verschoyle. But we want a great deal more than venerable chaperons. We want a young and charming lady to do the honours for us. Mrs. Arbuthnot, we want you!’
Now Dinah’s nature held as little commonplace vanity as could well fall to woman’s share: through commonplace vanity had Lord Rex never, at this juncture, won her to say ‘Yes.’ From pleasure, so-called, she had shrunk, more than ever, since the taste she got of pleasure at the rose-show—yes, during the very hours when, with rash strategy, she had been planning to act a part in Gaston Arbuthnot’s world, among Gaston’s friends.
But every human being, given a wide enough scope, must end by justifying the cynic’s aphorism. The resisting powers of the best man, of the best woman living, have their price, so far as insignificant mundane matters are concerned.
No need to seek far for poor sore-hearted Dinah’s price!
Whispers of the projected yachting party had, for several days past, reached her, chiefly in fragments of talk between her husband and the other boarders in Miller’s Hotel. She knew that Gaston was an invited guest. She had an impression, based on air, and yet, like many a jealous fear, not all foundationless, that Linda Thorne was to be the quasi-hostess, the graceful presiding influence of the hour.
‘Me!—you ask me?’ she faltered, sensible of a blinding rush of temptation, and not lifting her eyes from the canvas where she had now effaced the last trace of Lord Rex’s handiwork. ‘I should think others would be more suitable. I should think,’ the blood forsook her lips as she suggested the name, ‘that Mrs. Thorne——’
‘Oh, we have decided, all of us, against Linda,’ said Lord Rex, with his usual cool sincerity. ‘Mrs. Thorne is the nicest woman going, on shore.’
‘Of that I am convinced.’
‘And she has been kind enough to murmur an experimental “Yes,” though no one acknowledges to having asked her. (A suspicion goes about that it was Arbuthnot!) But Mrs. Thorne’s qualities are not sea-going. She has not the marine foot, as your husband would say. She and the Doctor will be of our party, of course, but Linda could never play the part of hostess for us. Oscar Jones took her and the de Carteret girls out sand-eeling—you know little Oscar, the one handsome fellow in the regiment?—and Mrs. Linda was sea-sick straight through the jolliest night of May moonlight. You like the ocean, I am sure, Mrs. Arbuthnot.’
‘Yes, I like it. Years ago, when we had not long been married, Mr. Arbuthnot hired a little cutter yacht. We spent four weeks at sea off the coast of Scotland. They were the happiest weeks of my life.’
Dinah said this with her accustomed quiet reserve. Yet, had Lord Rex known her better, he might have discerned a tremor in her voice as she recalled those far-off days—days when neither mistrust nor coldness had marred the first ineffable joy of her love for Gaston Arbuthnot.
‘That is all right; I am a second Byron myself. The sea is my passion. It would have been a sort of blow—I hope you understand me when I say that it would have been a sort of blow—to hear you say you were a bad sailor.’
Dinah, who never helped out a flattering speech, direct or implied, looked away from him.
‘A suspicion goes about that it was Arbuthnot.’ The words rang in her ears; light words, heedlessly spoken, yet destined to swell the total with which Gaston Arbuthnot was already too heavily credited on the balance-sheet of his wife’s heart.
‘We may count upon you, may we not? Arbuthnot has accepted for himself. Now we want your promise. If the weather continues like this we may rely upon seeing you on board the Princess next Wednesday?’
‘You have not explained what seeing me on board the Princess means.’ Dinah’s tone was evasive. Probably, thought Lord Rex, the puritanical conscience required time to collect itself! ‘I don’t know, at my staid age,’ she added, ‘that I should countenance you. What did you say about carrying all the nice-looking people in Guernsey out to sea?’
Upon this slight whisper of encouragement Rex Basire entered voluminously into details. The proprieties—to begin, he declared, solemn of face, with the facts of greatest significance—the proprieties were set at rest. An undeniable Archdeaconess, a Cassandra Tighe (minus nothing but her harp), were secured. The de Carteret girls, and Rosie Verschoyle, four of the Guernsey beauties regnant, had accepted. It would be a high spring tide on Wednesday, and the Princess must start early to reach the Race of Alderney before the ebb. Afternoon would find them anchored off Langrune, in Normandy. ‘Where we shall land, observe the manners and customs of the natives, eat a French dinner, take our little whirl, perhaps, in the casino ball-room,’ said Lord Rex, ‘and so back, à la Pepys, to our virtuous homes.’
‘The scheme is too gay for me,’ cried Dinah, with an uneasy dread of Gaston’s disapproval. ‘I never danced in my life. I hope—no, I am sure, my lord, that I shall never set foot inside the walls of a casino.’
‘Not of a French casino, Mrs. Arbuthnot?’ Lord Rex argued warily, still mindful of the puritanical note.
‘Certainly not. A French casino! Why, that only makes it worse.’
‘A French casino is an innocent kind of sea-side dancing school. Papas and mammas of families sit around. Small boys and girls exhibit their steps. Papa drinks his little glass of absinthe, mamma her tumbler of sugar-water. We go back to our hotel, hand-in-hand with the babies, at ten o’clock. Except the Zoological Gardens on week days, I know no human form of dissipation so mild as a French casino.’
‘I should have to meet too many strangers on board. I should be alone among them all. The only lady in Guernsey who has called on me is Geff’s pupil, Miss Bartrand of Tintajeux.’
‘Who will be invited to come, under your charge.’ Lord Rex adroitly left more delicate social questions untouched. ‘Marjorie Bartrand would be rough on a chaperon, I should think. Difficult to say whom the Girtonian of the future would not be rough on! But you, Mrs. Arbuthnot, seem to have stepped into her favour.’
‘And is Geoffrey to be asked?’
‘Geoffrey? Ah, to be sure—your cousin. Senior wrangler, was he not?’
‘Geoffrey took his honours in classics.’
‘Frightfully “boss” man, any way. Does not look as if he cared about frivolous amusements in general, still——’
Lord Rex hesitated. Some finer prophetic sense informed him that Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s might be a name as well omitted from the programme of pleasure he was chalking out with such zealous trouble for next Wednesday.
‘But is the party to be frivolous? I hardly understood that. No one loves the sea better than Geff. He will go, I’m sure, if I go.’
This was said by Dinah with conviction. Through long habit she had come to regard Geoffrey’s obedience to her smallest wish as an accomplished fact.
‘Notes shall be despatched to Miss Bartrand and to your cousin without an hour’s delay. I am awfully indebted to you, Mrs. Arbuthnot. You can’t think what a load of moral obligation you have taken off my mind by saying “Yes.”’
And when Lord Rex left Miller’s Hotel he was radiant; a possibility of Geoffrey Arbuthnot saying ‘Yes’ also, the one little shadow of a cloud that obscured next Wednesday’s horizon.
On his return to Fort-William, later on in the day, his road took him past the garden gate of Doctor Thorne’s Bungalow. The gate stood open, and Lord Rex sauntered in, as it was the habit of unoccupied insular youth to do, during the afternoon hours of tea and gossip.
Small Rahnee and her ayah were picturesquely grouped upon a bright square of Persian carpet on the lawn. A macaw and two tame parrots gave a local, or eastern, colour to the scene as they screeched from their perches among the garden shrubs. Within one of the drawing-room windows—bay windows opening to the ground—reposed Linda. Her dress was of embroidered Indian muslin, not absolutely innocent of darns, perhaps, for the Doctor retained so much of old bachelor habit as to be his own housekeeper, and poor Linda must practise many a humiliating economy in her lot of femme incomprise. Bangles, similar to Rahnee’s, concealed the outline of the lady’s thin wrists. Her black hair, worn in a single coil, revealed sharply the outline of her head, Linda’s one incontestably good point. The cunningly arranged shadow of a rose-coloured window awning, if it did not hide, at least threw possible defects of complexion, suspicions of coming crow’s-feet, into uncertainty.
Linda Thorne was not a pretty woman. Lord Rex, his eyes still dazzled by Dinah’s wild rose face, felt more than usually cognisant of the fact. And still, with Rahnee and the turbaned ayah, with the macaws and parrots, the embroidered Indian dress, the Indian-looking bungalow, Linda ‘composed’ well. She formed the central figure of a Benjamin Constant picture, right pleasant to behold.
A hum of animated voices was in the air. Three or four young and pretty girls were distributed, spots of agreeable colour, about Linda’s sober-hued drawing-room. The prettiest of them all presided over a miniature tea-table drawn close beside the hostess at the open window. And the burthen of everybody’s talk, the clashing point of everybody’s opinions, was next Wednesday’s yachting-party.
‘We are to start at seven. Mamma heard it from Captain Ozanne himself.’
‘At midnight of Tuesday. The Princess will be away twenty-four hours.’
‘A week, at least, Rosie! And Madame Corbie is to be chaperon.’
‘I heard—Cassandra Tighe.’
‘There are to be no chaperons worth speaking of, for of course—don’t be offended, Linda—we cannot look upon you as one, so——’
‘So you are quite wrong, all of you,’ exclaimed Lord Rex, his head peeping up suddenly across Linda Thorne’s shoulder. ‘Miss Verschoyle, will you give me a cup of tea if I promise to set you right in a few of your guesses? A cup of tea, and your protection, for I am certain to be well attacked.’
‘This stimulates our curiosity to the proper point,’ the young lady answered, with a doubtful smile, but making place for Lord Rex at her side. ‘At the same time, it is an admission you have been doing something rather less wise than usual. Do you take six or seven lumps of sugar in your tea, Lord Rex? I never remember the precise number.’
Rosie Verschoyle was a bright-complexioned, dimpled girl of nineteen, with an exactly proportioned waist (of society), an exactly correct profile, the exact mass of nut-brown hair that fashion requires descending to her brows, and a pair of large, nut-brown, somewhat spaniel-like eyes. Until Dinah’s advent Lord Rex thought Rosie the fairest among the beauties regnant, and was openly her slave at all the picnics and garden-parties going. Miss Verschoyle had not the air of encouraging these attentions. She seldom lost a chance of making Rex Basire’s vanity smart, and had been known to say that she positively disliked that plain, forward boy who managed to scare away really pleasant partners and monopolise one’s best dances. And still, throughout the whole island society, among Rosie’s more intimate girl-friends notably, there had been a growing suspicion for some time past that Miss Verschoyle would, one day, marry Lord Rex Basire.
‘I take as many lumps as Miss Verschoyle chooses to give me.’ He received the cup with mock humility from her plump, white, inexpressive hands. ‘The sweets and bitters as they come.’
‘Bitters—in tea!’ echoed Rosie, opening her brown eyes wide. ‘Steer clear of metaphors, Lord Rex. They really do not suit your style of eloquence.’
‘Rosie, Rosie! While you two children spar, the rest of us are dying of curiosity.’ The admonition was made in Linda’s smoothest voice. ‘Lord Rex, recollect your promise. You know, you are to set us all right. What are the plans for Wednesday? Why are we certain, when we have heard these plans, to attack you? Come here, and make confession.’
Lord Rex perched himself, obediently, on a stool near Mrs. Thorne’s feet. Then, sipping the tea sweetened for him by Rosie Verschoyle, with more trepidation of spirit, so he afterwards owned, than he ever felt before the fire of an enemy, he thus began his shrift:
‘We have made due inquiry from the harbour-master, and find the Princess must clear out as soon as the first English steamer is signalled. Will seven o’clock be too early for you all?’
A chorus of cheerfully acquiescent voices answered, ‘No.’
‘We have also invited Madame Corbie and the Archdeacon. It seems, for an expedition of the kind, one ought to have a real substantial chaperon or two. I beg your pardon, Mrs. Thorne, but——’
‘Oh, don’t apologise,’ cried Linda, with good humour, willing, like most of her sex, to condone the accusation of over-youth.
‘And Madame Corbie accepts, conditionally. I have been paying my court to aged ladies half the morning! So, unconditionally, does Miss Tighe. As regards chaperonage, one may say really—really——’ hesitated Lord Rex, feeling in his guilty soul how red he grew, ‘one may say, Mrs. Thorne, that, in the matter of chaperons, there will be an embarrassment of riches.’
‘Especially as mamma never allows me to go anywhere without herself. Was it about the superabundance of chaperons that you knew we should attack you?’
Rosie Verschoyle asked the question in her gay, thin little voice, her unpremeditated manner, yet with a directness of aim that poor Lord Rex had not the cleverness to parry.
‘Attack me? Why, that was only a foolish joke, don’t you know! Yes, we—we have Mrs. Verschoyle and the Archdeaconess as chaperons-in-chief. Only, poor Mrs. Verschoyle, the moment the Princess moves, will be in the cabin, and the Archdeaconess——’
‘Try not to look so conscious. The Archdeaconess?’
‘If the wind veers between this and Wednesday, will not start at all. And so, as we must have a married lady to do hostess for us, and as you, Mrs. Thorne, are also not a first-rate sailor, I have asked Mrs. Arbuthnot.’
A heavy silence followed upon this announcement. Linda Thorne was the first to break it.
‘And Mrs. Arbuthnot has accepted? I need hardly ask the question.’
‘Yes,’ returned Lord Rex, staunchly enough, ‘I am glad to say that Mrs. Arbuthnot has accepted.’
Rosie Verschoyle turned over and examined a band of silver on her round white wrist.
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot? Surely that is the same person we saw with Marjorie Bartrand at the rose-show? How wonderfully handsome she is! Mamma has talked of nothing else. One will be quite too glad to see her near. In these democratic days we must all bow unquestioningly before Beauty. The capital B renders it abstract.’
Lord Rex felt the speech to be ungenerous. Vague questionings that he had once or twice held within himself, as to whether he might or might not be in danger of liking Miss Verschoyle too well, received an impromptu solution at this moment. He was in no danger at all: held the local estimate of her good looks, even, to be overstrained. As she stood before him, in her fulness of youthful grace, the delicate profile held aloft, the little cruel sentences escaping, one by one, from her pouting red lips, Rosie’s prettiness seemed changed to Rex Basire as though the wand of some malignant fairy godmother had secretly touched her.
‘My political opinions outstep democracy, Miss Verschoyle. But if I were as starched a Tory as—as my own father, by Jove! I should think Mrs. Arbuthnot’s society an honour. I don’t understand that sort of thing, the tone people put on in speaking of a woman whose only crime is her beauty.’
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot, if she needs a defender, is fortunate in possessing so warm a one.’
The remark was made by Rosie Verschoyle with unwise readiness.
‘But one could never imagine her, poor dear, needing anything of the kind.’ It was Linda Thorne who spoke. ‘I have been introduced to Mrs. Arbuthnot by her husband. I have heard about her, also from him, and I am sure she is quite the most harmless of individuals. Not naturally bright! Like too many other gifted creatures, Mr. Arbuthnot may know the want of household sympathy——’
‘Gets along capitally without it,’ interrupted Lord Rex. ‘Never saw any man better satisfied with himself and with his life than Arbuthnot.’
‘Not naturally bright, and lacking the education which, in more fortunate people, serves as a varnish to poorness of ability. If they stay here long enough I shall persuade Mr. Arbuthnot, as a duty, to make his wife take lessons—in music, riding, calisthenics, anything to beguile her from that patient, that perpetual cross-stitch.’
Lord Rex gave a searching look at Linda Thorne’s face. His was no very high or luminous character, as will be seen in the after course of this history. Yet were his failings chiefly those of his age and circumstances. When he erred it was without premeditation, walking along tracks trodden hard by others. His virtues were his own, and among these was the virtue of thorough straightforwardness. It trembled on Lord Rex’s tongue to ask Linda a crucial question relative to Gaston Arbuthnot’s ‘duty,’ when approaching footsteps made themselves heard along the gravel drive. There came a shrill shout of welcome in Rahnee’s voice, a torrent of pigeon English, presumably from the ayah, in which the words ‘Missy ’Butnot’ might be distinguished. Linda Thorne’s Indian-bleached cheeks assumed a just perceptible shade of red.
‘Talk of angels,’ she observed, raising her finger to her lips, ‘and straightway we hear the flutter of their wings! It would be wise to choose a rather less invidious theme than the demerits of cross-stitch.’
And then, almost before she finished speaking, Gaston Arbuthnot, with the quiet air of a man certain of the reception that awaits him, entered upon the scene.
Next Wednesday’s yachting expedition continued to be the subject of talk among Linda’s visitors. But it was talk with a difference; the character of Ophelia cut, by desire, from the play. Hard to bewail the lot of gifted creatures, or discuss the necessity, in these democratic days, of bowing down to Beauty, with Dinah’s husband taking part in one’s conversation! When the party had dispersed, however,—Lord Rex, in spite of his disenchantment, escorting Rosie Verschoyle home,—when Linda Thorne was left alone with Gaston Arbuthnot, she spoke her mind. And her tone was one which all her social knowledge, all her powers of self-command and self-effacement, failed to render sweet.
Now it was a peculiarity belonging to Gaston Arbuthnot’s character that he was apt to mystify every human creature, his cousin Geoffrey excepted, with whom his relations were near. The more intimate you became with this man the less firm seemed the moral grip by which you held him. Dinah’s over-diffident heart perpetually doubted the stability of his love. She was unhappy with him, dreading lest, in her society, he were not enough amused. She was unhappy away from him, dreading lest in her absence he were amused too well! Linda Thorne was equally at fault as to the texture of his friendship. Long years ago, Gaston Arbuthnot’s boyish good looks—perhaps it must be owned, Gaston Arbuthnot’s devoted attentions—won all of tender sentiment that Linda, then a neglected, overworked governess, had to give. She had been to India in the interval. She had learnt the market worth of sentiment. There was Dr. Thorne ... Rahnee! There were her duties, real and histrionic, to fill her life. And the days of her youth had reached the flickering hour before twilight.
But Linda had not forgiven Gaston Arbuthnot. She had not forgotten how near she once came to loving him. And she was sorely, unreasonably wounded, through vanity rather than through feeling, by Dinah’s fresh and girlish charm.
An anomalous position; perhaps, a commoner one than some young wives, morbidly sensitive as to alien influence over their husbands, may suspect.
‘So there has been a small imbroglio about Wednesday’s arrangements! I cannot tell you how glad I am to be relieved from a weight of sea-going responsibility. Mrs. Arbuthnot, I am sure, will enact hostess for our young subalterns so much more gracefully than I could. She is a good sailor, doubtless?’
Gaston had taken up a morsel of drawing-paper and some red chalk—every kind of artistic appliance had found its way, of late, into Mrs. Thorne’s drawing-room—some ideal woman’s face with beauty, with anger on it, was growing into life under his hand. He finished, in a few delicate, subtle touches, the shadow between a low Greek brow and eyelid ere he spoke.
‘Dinah is a famous sailor. We look back to a little Scottish yachting tour we made, soon after our marriage, as about the best time of our lives.’
Linda Thorne, a fair decipherer of surface feeling in general, could gather absolutely nothing from Gaston’s level tone. He raised his eyes, during a steady second or two, from his paper; he met her interrogative glance with one of strict neutrality.
‘I am relieved and at the same time stupidly inquisitive. Now, why in the name of all things truthful, did you not mention that Mrs. Arbuthnot meant to go with us on Wednesday?’
Gaston was silent; too absorbed perhaps in his creation, slight chalk sketch though it was, to give heed to matter so unimportant as this which Linda pressed upon him.
‘Possibly you were not aware that Mrs. Arbuthnot was going!’
Linda Thorne hazarded the remark with a suspicion of innocent malice.
‘That really is the truth.’ Taking a folding-book from his breast, Gaston stored away his sketch carefully between its leaves. ‘You must excuse me, Mrs. Thorne. An idea struck me just now, suggested by a look I surprised on the face of Miss Verschoyle, and I hastened forthwith to make my memorandum. Dinah to enact hostess for the subalterns on Wednesday, do you say? Surely not. I could almost wish that it were to be so. But my wife, as you know, keeps to her own quiet way of life.’
‘We have Lord Rex Basire’s word for it. According to Lord Rex, Mrs. Arbuthnot has most decidedly accepted their invitation.’
‘Dinah does not mean to go. Lord Rex deceives himself.’
Gaston Arbuthnot spoke with sincerity. He had told Geoffrey, as a jest, that Dinah was turning over a new leaf, beginning to discover, poor girl, that there might be other music in the spheres besides that of the eternal domestic duo without accompaniment. Of Dinah’s profoundly changed mood, her resolve of gaining wider views by frequenting a world which as yet she knew not, he was ignorant.
Linda Thorne watched him sceptically.
‘Pray do not dash my hopes. I trust and I believe that Mrs. Arbuthnot will play hostess to us all next Wednesday. Come!’ she added, with rather forced playfulness. ‘Will you make me a bet about it? I will give you any amount of odds you like in Jouvin’s best.’
‘It is against my principles to bet on a certainty, Mrs. Thorne. I am as certain that Dinah has not pledged herself for Wednesday’s picnic as that I have pledged myself to dine with Dr. and Mrs. Thorne this evening.’
But, in spite of his assured voice, a shade of restlessness was to be traced in Gaston Arbuthnot’s manner. He would not remain, as it had become his habit to do, at The Bungalow, singing, or drawing, or chatting away the two hours between afternoon tea and dinner, in Linda’s society. Even Rahnee (to Gaston’s mind the first attraction in the house) must forego her usual game of hide-and-seek with ‘Missy ’Butnot.’ Even Rahnee threw her thin, bangled arms round her playmate’s neck in vain. Frankly, so, at last, he was brought, to make confession, he had forgotten to tell Dinah of his engagement, must hurry back, forthwith, to Miller’s Hotel to set Dinah’s heart at rest. Unnecessary? ‘Ah, Mrs. Thorne,’ and as he spoke Gaston’s eyes looked straight into the lady’s soul, ‘that question of necessity just depends upon the state of one’s domestic legislation. Regarding these small matters, my wife and I, fortunately for ourselves, are in our honeymoon stage still.’
This was always Gaston’s tone in speaking of Dinah at The Bungalow. He painted truth in truth’s brightest colours whenever he afforded Linda Thorne a glimpse of his own household happiness.