I am Miss Goodward." She gave him her hand for a gracious moment before she turned to what had brought her so early down, the arrangement of two great bowls of wild ferns and vines which a servant had just placed on either end of the low mantlepiece.
"We brought them in from Archer's Glen on the way home," she told him over her shoulder, her hands busy with deft, quick touches.

She was all in white, which took a pearly lustre from the lamps, and for the moment she was as beautiful as Peter believed her.

A tiny unfinished phrase of the song floated half consciously from her lips as a bubble.

"They look better so, don't you think ?" As she stood off to measure the effect, it seemed to Peter that the Spirit of the House had received him; it was so men dream of home-coming, without sensible displacement of a life going on in it, lovely and secure, as a bark slips into some still pool to its moorings.

He yielded himself naturally to the impersonal intimacy of her welcome and all the sordid ways of his life led up to her.
It was not all at once he saw it so.