"Oh no, never a word, have we, Johnson dear?"

"Never. He's not half a bad fellow, Majendie."

Dr. Gardner rose to go.

"Oh, please—don't go before they come."

Mrs. Gardner hesitated, but the doctor, vague in his approaches, displayed a certain energy in his departure.

They passed Mrs. Walter Majendie on the stairs.

She had come alone. That, Mrs. Eliott felt, was a bad beginning. She could see that it struck even Johnson's obtuseness as unfavourable, for he presently effaced himself.

"Fanny," said Anne, holding her friend's evasive eye with the determination of her query, "tell me, who are the Ransomes?"

"The Ransomes? Have they called?"

"Yes, but I was out. I didn't see them."

"Oh, my dear," said Mrs. Eliott, in a tone which implied that when Anne did see them——

"Are they very dreadful?"

"Well—they're not your sort."

Anne meditated. "Not—my—sort. And the Lawson Hannays, what sort are they?"

"Well, we don't know them. But there are a great many people in Scale one doesn't know."

"Are they socially impossible, or what?"

"Oh—socially, they would be considered—in Scale—all right. But he is, or was, mixed up with some very queer people."

Anne's cold face intimated that the adjective suggested nothing to her. Mrs. Eliott was compelled to be explicit. The word queer was applied in Scale to persons of dubious honesty in business; whereas it was not so much in business as in pleasure that Mr. Lawson Hannay had been queer.

"Mr. Hannay may be very steady now, but I believe he belonged to a very fast set before he married her."

"And she? Is she nice?"

"She may be very nice for all I know."

"I think," said Anne, "she wouldn't call if she wasn't nice, you know."

She meant that if Mrs. Lawson Hannay hadn't been nice Walter would never have sanctioned her calling.

"Oh, as for that," said her friend, "you know what Scale is. The less nice they are the more they keep on calling. But I should think"—she had suddenly perceived where Anne's argument was tending—"she is probably all right."

"Do you know anything of Mr. Charlie Gorst?"

"No. But Johnson does. At least I'm sure he's met him."

Mrs. Eliott saw it all. Poor Anne was being besieged, bombarded by her husband's set.

"Then he isn't impossible?"

"Oh no, the Gorsts are a very old Lincolnshire family. Quite grand. What a number of people you're going to know, my dear. But, your husband isn't to take you away from all your old friends."

"He isn't taking me anywhere. I shall stay," said Anne proudly, "exactly where I was before."

She was determined that her old friends should never know to what a sorrowful place she had been taken.

"You dear," said Mrs. Eliott, holding out a suddenly caressing hand.

Anne trembled a little under the caress. "Fanny," said she, "I want you to know him."

"I mean to," said Mrs. Eliott hurriedly.

"And I want him, even more, to know you."

"Then," Mrs. Elliot argued to herself, "she knows nothing; or she never could suppose we would be kindred spirits."

But she carried it off triumphantly. "Well," said she, "I hope you're free for the fifteenth?"

"The fifteenth?"

"Yes, or any other evening. We want to give a little dinner, dear, to you and to your husband—for him to meet all your friends."

Anne tried not to look too grateful.

The upward way, then, was being prepared for him. Beneficent intelligences were at work, influences were in the air, helping her to raise him.

In her gladness she had failed to see that, considering the very obvious nature of the civility, Fanny Eliott was making the least shade too much of it.



CHAPTER VII

Anne presented herself that evening in her husband's study with a sheaf of visiting cards in her hand. She thought it possible that she might obtain further illumination by confronting him with them.

"Walter," said she "all these people have called on us. What do you think I'd better do?"

"I think you'll have to call on them some day."

"All of them?"

He took the cards from her and glanced through them.

"Let me see. Charlie Gorst—we must be nice to him."

"Is he nice?"

"I think so. Edie's very fond of him."

"And Mrs. Lawson Hannay?"

"Oh, you must call on her."

"Shall I like her."

"Possibly. You needn't see much of her if you don't."

"Is it easy to drop people?"

"Perfectly."

"And what about Mrs. Ransome?"

He frowned. "Has she called?"

"Yes."

"I'll find out when she's not at home and let you know. You can call then."

A fourth card he tore up and threw into the fire.

"Some people have confounded impudence."

Anne went away confirmed in her impression that Walter had a large acquaintance to whom he was by no means anxious to introduce his wife. He might, she reflected, have incurred the connection through the misfortune of his business. The life of a ship-owner in Scale was fruitful in these embarrassments.

But if these disagreeable people indeed belonged to the period she mentally referred to as his "past," she was not going to tolerate them for an instant. He must give them up.

She judged that he was prepared for so much renunciation. She hoped that he would, in time, adopt her friends in place of them. He was inclined, after all, to respond amicably to Mrs. Eliott's overtures.

Anne wondered how he would comport himself at the dinner on the fifteenth. She owned to a little uneasiness at the prospect. Would he indeed yield to the sobering influence of Thurston Square? Or would he try to impose his alien, his startling personality on it? She had begun to realise how alien he was, how startling he could be. Would he sit silent, uninspiring and uninspired? Or would unholy and untimely inspirations seize him? Would he scatter to the winds all conversational conventions, and riot in his own unintelligible frivolity? What would he say to Mrs. Eliott, that priestess of the pure intellect? Was there anything in him that could be touched by her uncoloured, immaterial charm? Would he see that Mr. Eliott's density was only a mask? Would the Gardners bore him? And would he like Miss Proctor? And if he didn't, would he show it, and how? His mere manners would, she knew, be irreproachable, but she had no security for his spiritual behaviour. He impressed her as a creature uncaught, undriven; graceful, but immeasurably capricious.

The event surprised her.

For the first five minutes or so, it seemed that Mrs. Eliott and her dinner were doomed to failure; so terrible a cloud had fallen on her, and on her husband, and on every guest. Never had the poor priestess appeared so abstract an essence, so dream-driven and so forlorn. Never had Mr. Eliott worn his mask to so extinguishing a purpose. Never had Miss Proctor been so obtrusively superior, Mrs. Gardner so silent, Dr. Gardner so vague. They were all, she could see, possessed, crushed down by their consciousness of Majendie and his monstrous past.

Into this circle, thus stupefied by his presence, Majendie burst with the courage of unconsciousness.

Mr. Eliott had started a topic, the conduct of Sir Rigley Barker, the ex-member for Scale. A heavy ball of conversation began to roll slowly up and down the table, between Mr. Eliott and Dr. Gardner. Majendie snatched at it deftly as it passed him, caught it, turned it in his hands till it grew golden under his touch. Mr. Eliott thought there wasn't much in poor Sir Rigley.

"Not much in him?" said Majendie. "How about that immortal speech of his?"

"Immortal—" echoed Mr. Eliott dubiously.

"Indestructible! The poor fellow couldn't end it. It simply coiled and uncoiled itself and went off, in great loops, into eternity. It began in all innocence—naturally, as it was his maiden speech—when he rose, don't you know, to propose an amendment. I take it that speech was so maidenly that it shrank from anything in the nature of a proposal. It went on in a terrified manner, coyly considering and hesitating—till it cleared the House. And he was awfully pleased when we congratulated him on his 'maidenly reserve.'"

"How did he ever get elected?" said Miss Proctor.

"My dear lady, it was a glorious stroke of the Opposition. They withdrew their candidate when he contested the election. Of course, they felt that he'd only got to make a speech and there'd be a dissolution. You simply saw Parliament melting away before him. If he'd gone on he'd have worn out the British constitution."

Dr. Gardner looked at Mrs. Gardner and their eyes brightened, as Majendie continued to unfold the amazing resources of Sir Rigley. He breathed on the ex-member like a god, and played with him like a juggler; he tossed him into the air and kept him there, a radiant, unsubstantial thing. The ex-member disported himself before Mrs. Eliott's dinner-party as he had never disported himself in Parliament. Majendie had given him a career, endowed him with glorious attributes. The ex-member, as a topic, developed capacities unsuspected in him before. The others followed his flight breathless, afraid to touch him lest he should break and disappear under their hands.

By the time Majendie had done with him, the ex-member had entered on a joyous immortality in Scale.

And in the middle of it all Anne laughed.

Miss Proctor was the first to recover from the surprise of it. She leaned across the table with a liberal and vivid smile, opulent in appreciation.

"Well, Mr. Majendie, Sir Rigley ought to be grateful to you. If ever there was a dull subject dead and buried, it was he, poor man. And now the difficulty will be to forget him."

"I don't think," said Majendie gravely, "I shall forget him myself in a hurry."

Oh no, he never would forget Sir Rigley. He didn't want to forget him. He would be grateful to him as long as he lived. He had made Anne laugh. A girl's laugh, young and deliciously uncontrollable, springing from the immortal heart of joy.

It was the first time he had heard her laugh so. He didn't know she could do it. The hope of hearing her do it again would give him something to live for. He would win her yet if he could make her laugh.

Anne was more surprised than anybody, at him and at herself. It was a revelation to her, his cleverness, his brilliant social gift. She was only intimate with one kind of cleverness, the kind that feeds itself on lectures and on books. She had not thought of Walter as clever. She had only thought of him as good. That one quality of goodness had swallowed up the rest.

Miss Proctor took possession of her where she sat in the drawing-room, as it were amid the scattered fragments of the ex-member (he still, among the ladies, emitted a feeble radiance). Miss Proctor had always approved of Anne. If Anne had no metropolitan distinction to speak of, she was not in the least provincial. She was something by herself, superior and rare. A little inclined to take herself too seriously, perhaps; but her husband's admirable levity would, no doubt, improve her.

"My dear," said Miss Proctor, "I congratulate you. He's brilliant, he's charming, he's unique. Why didn't we know of him before? Where has he been hiding his talents all this time?"

(A talent that had not bloomed in Thurston Square was a talent pitiably wasted.)

Anne smiled a blanched, perfunctory smile. Ah, where had he been hiding himself, indeed?

Miss Proctor stood central, radiating the rich afterglow of her appreciation. Her gaze was a little critical of her friends' faces, as if she were measuring the effect, on a provincial audience, of Majendie's conversational technique. She swept down to a seat beside her hostess.

"My dear Fanny," she said, "why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you—"

"That he was that sort. I didn't know there was such a delightful man in Scale. What have you all been dreaming of?"

Mrs. Eliott tried to look both amiable and intelligent. In the presence of Mr. Majendie's robust reality it was indeed as if they had all been dreaming. Her instinct told her that the spirit of pure comedy was destruction to the dreams she dreamed. She tried to be genial to her guest's accomplishment; but she felt that if Mr. Majendie's talents were let loose in her drawing-room, it would cease to be the place of intellectual culture. On the other hand she perceived that Miss Proctor's idea was to empty that drawing-room by securing Mr. Majendie for her own. Mrs. Eliott remained uncomfortably seated on her dilemma.

Sounds of laughter reached her from below. The men were unusually late in returning to the drawing-room. They appeared a little flushed by the hilarious festival, as if Majendie had had on them an effect of mild intoxication. She could see that even Dr. Gardner was demoralised. He wore, under his vagueness, the unmistakable air of surrender to an unfamiliar excess. Mr. Eliott too had the happy look of a man who has fed loftily after a long fast.

"Anne dear," said Majendie, as they walked back the few yards between Thurston Square and Prior Street, "we shan't have to do that very often, shall we?"

"Why not? You can't say we didn't have a delightful evening."

"Yes, but it was very exhausting, dear, for me."

"You? You didn't show much sign of exhaustion. I never heard you talk so well."

"Did I talk well?"

"Yes. Almost too well."

"Too much, you mean. Well, I had to talk, when nobody else did. Besides, I did it for a purpose."

But what his purpose was Majendie did not say.

Anne had been human enough to enjoy a performance so far beyond the range of her anticipations. She was glad, above all, that Walter had made himself acceptable in Thurston Square. But when she came to think of what was, what must be known of him in Scale, she was appalled by his incomprehensible ease of attitude. She reflected that this must have been the first time he had dined in Thurston Square since the scandal. Was it possible that he did not realise the insufferable nature of that incident, the efforts it must have cost to tolerate him, the points that had been stretched to take him in? She felt that it was impossible to exaggerate the essential solemnity of that evening. They had met together, as it were, to celebrate Walter's return to the sanctities and proprieties he had offended. He had been formally forgiven and received by the society which (however Fanny Eliott might explain away its action) had most unmistakably cast him out. She had not expected him to part with his indomitable self-possession under the ordeal, but she could have wished that he had borne himself with a little more modesty. He had failed to perceive the redemptive character of the feast, he had turned it into an occasion for profane personal display.

Mrs. Eliott's dinner-party had not saved him; on the contrary, he had saved the dinner-party.



CHAPTER VIII

Anne was right. Though Majendie was, as he expressed it, "up to her designs upon his unhappy soul," he remained unconscious of the part to be played by Mrs. Eliott and her circle in the scheme of his salvation. From his observation of the aristocracy of Thurston Square, it would never have occurred to him that they were people who could count, whichever way you looked at them.

Meanwhile he was a little disturbed by his own appearance as a heavenward pilgrim. He was not sure that he had not gone a little too far that way, and he felt that it was a shame to allow Anne to take him seriously.

He confided his scruples to Edith.

"Poor dear," he said, "it's quite pathetic. You know, she thinks she's saving me."

"And do you mind being saved?"

"Well, no, I don't mind a little of it. But the question is, how long I can keep it up."

"You mean, how long she'll keep it up?"

He laughed. "Oh, she'll keep it up for ever. No possible doubt about that. She'll never tire. I wonder if I ought to tell her."

"Tell her what?"

"That it won't work. That she can't do it that way. She's wasting my time and her own."

"Oh, what's a little time, dear, when you've all eternity in view?"

"But I haven't. I've nothing in view. My view, at present, is entirely obscured by Anne."

"Poor Anne! To think she actually stands between you and your Maker."

"Yes, you know—in her very anxiety to introduce us."

They looked at each other. Her sainthood was so accomplished, her union with heaven so complete, that she could afford herself these profaner sympathies. She was secretly indignant with Anne's view of Walter as unpresentable in the circles of the spiritual elite.

"It never struck her that you mightn't need an introduction after all; that you were in it as much as she. That's the sort of mistake one might expect from—from a spiritual parvenu, but not from Anne."

"Oh, come, I don't consider myself her equal by a long chalk."

"Well, say she does belong to the peerage; you're a gentleman, and what more can she require?"

"She can't see that I am (If I am. You say so). She considers me—spiritually—a bounder of the worst sort."

"That's her mistake. Though I must say you sometimes lend yourself to it with your horrible profanity."

"I can't help it, Edie. She's so funny with it. She makes me profane."

"Dear Walter, if you can think Anne funny—"

"I do. I think she's furiously funny, and horribly pathetic. All the time, you know, she thinks she's leading me upward. Profanity's my only refuge from hypocrisy."

"Oh no, not your only refuge. You say she thinks she's leading you. Don't let her think it. Make her think you're leading her."

"Do you think," said Majendie, "she'd enjoy that quite so much?"

"She'd enjoy it more. If you took her the right way. The way I mean."

"What's that?"

"You must find out," said she. "I'm not going to tell you everything."

Majendie became thoughtful. "My only fear was that I couldn't keep it up. But you really don't think, then, that I should score much if I did?"

"No, my dear, I don't. And as for keeping it up, you never could. And if you did she'd never understand what you were doing it for. That's not the way to show you're in love with her."

"But that's just what I don't want her to see. That's what she hates so much in me. I've always understood that in these matters it's discreeter not to show your hand too plainly. You see, it's just as if we'd never been married, for all she cares. That's the trouble."

"There's something in that. If she's not in love with you—"

"Look here, Edie, you're a woman, and you know all about them. Do you really, honestly think Anne ever was in love with me?"

"Oh, don't ask me. How should I know?"

"No, but," he persisted, "what do you think?"

"I think she was in love."

"But not with me, though?"

"No, no, not with you."

"With whom, then?"

"Darling idiot, there wasn't any who. If there was, do you think I'd give her away like that? If you'd asked me what she was in love with—"

"Well, what then?"

"Your goodness. She was head over ears in love with that."

"I see. With something that I wasn't."

"No, with something that you were, that you are, only she doesn't know it."

"Then," said Majendie, "you can't get out of it, she's in love with me."

"Oh no, no, you dear goose, not with you. To be in love with you she'd have to be in love with everything you're not, as well as everything you are; with everything you have been, with everything you never were, with everything you will be, with everything you might be, could be, should be."

"That's a large order, Edie."

"There's a larger one than that. She might sweep all that overboard, see it go by whole pieces (the best pieces) at a time, and still be in love with the dear, incomprehensible, indescribable you. That," said Edie, triumphant in her wisdom, "is what being in love is."

"And do you think she isn't in it?"

"No. Not anywhere near it. But—it's a big but—"

"I don't care how big it is. Don't bother me with it."

"Bother you? Why, it's a beautiful but. As I said, she isn't in love with you; but she may be any minute. It's just touch and go with her. It depends on you."

"Heavens, what am I to do? I've done everything."

"Yes, you have, but she hasn't. She's done nothing. She doesn't know how to. You've got to show her."

He shook his head hopelessly. "You're beyond me. I don't understand. There isn't anything for me to do. How am I to show her?"

"I mean show her what there is in it. What it means. What it's going to be for her as well as you. Just go at it hard, harder than you did before you married her."

"I see, I've got to make love to her all over again."

"Exactly. All over again from the very beginning."

"I say!" He took it in, her idea, in all the width and splendour of its simplicity. "And do it differently?"

"Oh, very differently."

"I don't quite see where the difference is to come in. What did I do before that was so wrong?"

"Nothing. That's just the worst of it. It was all too right. Ever so much too right. Don't you see? It's what we've been talking about. You made her in love with your goodness. And she was in love with it, not because it was your goodness, but because it was her own. That's why she wanted to marry it. She couldn't be in love with it for any other reason, because she's an egoist."

"No. There you're quite wrong. That's what she isn't."

"Oh, you are in love with her. Of course she's an egoist. All the nicest women are. I'm an egoist myself. Do you love me less for it?"

"I don't love you less for anything."

"Well—unless you can make Anne jealous of me—and you can't—you've got to love me less, now, dear boy. That's where I come in—to be kept out of it."

She had led him breathless on her giddy round; she plunged him back into bewilderment. He hadn't a notion where she was taking him to, where they would come out; but there was a desperate delight in the impetuous journey, the wind of her sudden flight lifted him and carried him on. He had always trusted the marvellous inspirations of her heart. She had failed him once; but now he could not deny that she had given him lights, and he looked for a stupendous illumination at the end of the way.

"Out of it!" he exclaimed. "Why, where should I have been without you? You were the beginning of it."

"I was indeed. You've got to take care I'm not the end of it, that's all."

"What on earth do you mean?"

"I mean what I say. You don't want Anne to be in love with you for my sake, do you?"

"N—no. I don't know that I do exactly. At least I should prefer that she was in love with me for my own."

"Well, you must make her, then. That's why you've got to leave me out of it. I've been too much in it all along. It was through me she conceived that unfortunate idea of your goodness. I'm its father and its mother and its nurse, I ministered to it every hour. I fed it, I brought it up, I brought it out, I provided all the opportunity for its display. Nothing else had a show beside your goodness, Wallie dear. It was something monstrous. It took Anne's affection from you and concentrated it all on itself. She worshipped it, she clung to it, she saw nothing else but it, and when it went everything went. You went first of all. Well, you must just see that that doesn't happen again."

"You mean that I must lead a life of iniquity?"

"You mustn't lead a life of anything."

"Do you mean I mustn't be good any more?"

Majendie's imagination played hilariously with this fantastic, this preposterous notion of his goodness.

"Oh yes, be good," said Edith, "but not too good. Above all, not too good to me. Concentrate on her, stupid."

"I have concentrated," he moaned, mystified beyond endurance. "Besides, you said I couldn't make her jealous."

"No, I wish you could. I mean, don't let her fall in love with your devotion to me again. Don't hold her by that one rope. Hold her by all your ropes; then, if one goes, it doesn't so much matter."

"I see. You don't trust my goodness."

"Oh, I trust it, so will she again. But don't you trust it. That precious goodness of yours is your rival. A bad, dangerous rival. You've got to beat it out of the field. Show that you're jealous of it. A little judicious jealousy won't hurt." Edith's eyes were still and profound with wisdom. "I don't believe you've ever yet made love to Anne properly. That's what it all comes to."

"Oh, I say," said he, "what do you know about it?"

"I'm only judging," said Edith, "by the results."

"Oh, that isn't fair."

"Perhaps it isn't," she owned, her wisdom growing by what it fed on.

"You see, she wouldn't let me do it properly."

Edith pondered. "Yes, but how long ago is it? And you've been married since."

"What difference does that make?"

"I should say it would make all the difference. Anne was a girl, then. She didn't understand. She's a woman now. She does understand. She can be appealed to."

He hid his face in his hands.

"I never thought of that," he murmured thickly.

"Of course you didn't."

"Edie," he said, and his face was still hidden, "however did you think of it?"

"Oh, I don't know. I see some things, and then other things come round to me. But you mustn't forget that you've got to begin all over again from the very beginning. You'll have to be very careful with her, every bit as careful as if she were a strange lady you've just met at a dance. Don't forget that she's strange, that she's another woman, in fact."

"I see. If there are to be many of these remarkable transformations of Anne, I shall have all the excitement of polygamy without its drawbacks."

"You will. And it's the same for her, remember. You're a strange man. You've just been introduced, you know—by me—and you're begging for the pleasure of the first waltz, and Anne pretends that her programme is full, and you look over her shoulder and see that it isn't, and that she puts you down for all the nice ones. And you sit out all the rest, and you flirt on the stairs, and take her in to supper, and, finally, you know, you pull yourself together and you do it—in the conservatory. Oh, it'll be so amusing, and so funny to watch. You'll begin by being most awfully polite to each other."

"I suppose I may yet be permitted to call this strange young lady Anne?"

"Yes. That's because you remember that you have known her once before, a very long time ago, when you were children. You are children, both of you. Oh, Walter, I believe you're looking forward to it; I believe you're glad you've got to do it all over again."

"Yes, Edie, I positively believe I am."

He rose, laughing, prepared to begin that minute his new wooing of Anne.

"Good-bye," said Edith, "it is good-bye, you know, and good luck to you."

This time she knew that she had been wise for him.

Anne would have been horrified if she had known that the situation, so terrible for her, was developing for her husband certain possibilities of charm. His irrepressible boyishness refused to accept it in all its moral gloom. There were, he perceived, advantages in these strained relations. They had removed Anne into the mysterious realm her maidenhood had inhabited, before marriage had had time to touch her magic. She had become once more the unapproachable and unattained. Their first courtship, pursued under intolerable restrictions of time and place, had been a rather uninspired affair, and its end a foregone conclusion. He had been afraid of himself, afraid sometimes of her. For he had not brought her the spontaneous, unalarmed, unspoiled spirit of his youth. He had come to her with a stain on his imagination and a wound in his memory. And she was holy to him. He had held himself in, lest a touch, a word, a gesture should recall some insufferable association.

Marriage had delivered him from the tyranny of reminiscence. No reminiscence could stand before the force of passion in possession. It purified; it destroyed; it built up in three days its own inviolable memory.

And Anne, with the best will in the world, had had no power to undo its work in him.

In herself, too, below her kindling spiritual consciousness, in the unexplored depth and darkness of her, its work remained.

Majendie was unaware how far he had become another man and she another woman. He was merely alive to the unusual and agreeable excitement of wooing his own wife. There was a piquancy in the experiment that appealed to him. Her new coldness called to him like a challenge. Her new remoteness waked the adventurous youth in him. His imagination was touched as it had not been touched before. He could see that Anne had not yet got over her discovery. The shock of it was in her nerves. He felt that she shrank from him, and his chivalry still spared her.

He ceased to be her husband and became her very courteous, very distant lover. He made no claims, and took nothing for granted. He simply began all over again from the very beginning. His conscience was vaguely appeased by the illusion of the new leaf, the rejuvenated innocence of the blank page. They had never been married (so the illusion suggested). There had been no revelations. They met as strangers in their own house, at their own table. In support of this pleasing fiction he set about his courtship with infinite precautions. He found himself exaggerating Anne's distance and the lapse of intimacy. He made his way slowly, through all the recognised degrees, from mere acquaintance, through friendship to permissible fervour.

And from time to time, with incomparable discretion, he would withhold himself that he might make himself more precious. He was hardly aware of his own restraint, his refinements of instinct and of mood. It was as if he drew, in his desperate necessity, upon unrealised, untried resources. There was something in Anne that checked the primitive impulse of swift chase, and called forth the curious half-feminine cunning of the sophisticated pursuer. She froze at his ardour, but his coldness almost kindled her, so that he approached by withdrawals and advanced by flights.

He displayed, first of all, a heavenly ignorance, an inspired curiosity regarding her. He consulted her tastes, as if he had never known them; he started the time-honoured lovers' topics; he talked about books—which she preferred and the reasons for her preference.

He did not advance very far that way. Anne was simply annoyed at the lapses in his memory.

He then began to buy books on the chance of her liking them, which answered better.

He promoted himself by degrees to personalities. He talked to her about herself, handling her with religious reticence as a thing of holy and incomprehensible mystery.

"I suppose," he said one day, "if I were good enough, I should understand you. Why do you sigh like that? Is it because I'm not good enough? Or because I don't understand?"

"I think," said she, "it is because I don't understand you."

"My dear" (he allowed himself at this point the more formal endearment), "I thought I was disgracefully transparent—I'm limpidity, simplicity itself. I've only one idea and one subject of conversation. Ask Edith. She understands me."

"Ah, Edith—" said Anne, as if Edith were a very different affair.

The intonation was hopeful, it suggested some slender and refined jealousy. (If only he could make her jealous!)

On the strength of it he advanced to the punctual daily offering of flowers, flowers for her drawing-room, flowers for her bedroom, flowers for her to wear. After that he took to writing her letters from the office with increasing frequency and fervour. Anne, too, was courteous and distant. She accepted all he had to offer as a becoming tribute to her feminine superiority, and evaded dexterously the deeper issue.

Now and then he reported his progress to Edith.

"I rather think," he said, "she's coming round. I'm regarded as a distinctly eligible person."

They laughed at his complete adoption of the part and his innocent joy in it.

That had always been his way. When he had begun a game there was no stopping him. He played it through to the end.

Edith would look up smiling and say: "Well, how goes the affair?" (They always called it the affair.) Or: "How did you get on to-day?"

And it would be: "Pretty well."—"Better to-day than yesterday."—"No luck to-day."

One Sunday he came to her radiant.

"She really does," said he, "seem interested in what I say."

"What did you talk about?"

"The influence of Christianity on woman. Was that good?"

"Very good."

"I didn't know very much about it, but I got her to tell me things."

"That," said Edith, "was still better."

"But she sticks to it that she doesn't understand me. That's bad."

"No," said Edith, "that's best of all. It shows she's thinking of you. She wants to understand. Believe me, the affair marches."

He meditated on that.

In the evening, the better to meditate, he withdrew to his study. It was not long before Anne came to him of her own accord. She asked if she might read aloud to him.

"I should be honoured," he replied stiffly.

She chose Emerson, "On Compensation." And Majendie did not care for Emerson.

But Anne had a charming voice; a voice with tones that penetrated like pain, that thrilled like a touch, that clung delicately like a shy caress; tones that were as a funeral bell for sadness; tones that rose to passion without ever touching it; clear, cool tones that were like water to passion's flame. Majendie closed his eyes and let her voice play over him.

"Did you like it?" she asked gravely.

"Like it? I love it."

"So do I. I hoped you would."

"My dear, I didn't understand one word of it."

"You can't make me believe you loved it then."

He looked at her.

"I loved the sound of your voice, dear."

"Oh," said she coldly, "is that all?"

"Yes," he said, "isn't it enough?"

"I'd rather—" she began and hesitated.

"You'd rather I understood Emerson?"

Her blood flushed in the honey whiteness of her face. She rose, put the book in its place, and left the room.

"Edith," he said, relating the incident afterwards, "I thought she was coming round when she wanted to read to me. Why did she get up and go like that?"

"She went, dear goose, because she was afraid to stay."

"Why afraid?"

"Because she's fighting you, Wallie. It's all right if she's got to fight."

"Yes, but suppose she wins?"

"She can't win fighting—she's a woman. Her only chance is to run away."

That night Anne knelt by her bedside and hid her face and prayed for Walter; that he might be purified, so that she might love him without sin; that he and she might travel together on the divine way, and together be received into the heavenly places.

She had felt that night the stirring of natural affection. It had come back to her, a feeble, bruised, humiliated thing. She could not harbour it without spiritual justification.

She kept herself awake by saying: "I can't love him, I can't love him—unless God makes him fit for me to love."

Sleeping, she dreamed that she was in his arms.



CHAPTER IX

It was Anne's birthday. It shone in mid-May like the front of June. Anne's bedroom was over Edith's and looked out on the garden. A little rain had fallen over night. Through the open window the day greeted her with a breath of flowers and earth; a day that came to her all golden, ripe and sweet from the south.

Her dressing-table was placed sideways from the window. Anne, fresh from her cold bath, in a white muslin gown, with her thick sleek hair coiled and burnished, sat before the looking-glass.

There was a knock at the door, not Nanna's bold awakening summons, but a shy and gentle sound. Her heart shook her voice as she responded.

"Is it permitted?" said Majendie.

"If you like," she answered quietly.

He presented his customary morning sacrifice of flowers. Hitherto he had not presumed so far as to bring it to her room. It waited for her decorously at breakfast time, beside her plate.

She took the flowers from him, acknowledged their fragrance by a quiver of her delicate nostrils, thanked him, and laid them on the dressing-table.

He seated himself on the window-sill, where he could see her with the day upon her. She noticed that he had brought with him, beside the flowers, a small oblong wooden box. He laid the box on his knee and covered it with his hand. He sat very still, looking at her as her firm white hands caressed her coiled hair into shape. Once she moved his flowers to find her comb, and laid them down again.

"Aren't you going to wear them?" he inquired anxiously.

Her upper lip lifted an instant, caught up, in its fashion, by the pretty play of the little sensitive amber mole. Two small white teeth showed and were hidden again. It was as if she had been about to smile, or to speak, and had thought better of it.

She took up the flowers and tried them, now at her breast, and now at her waist.

"Where shall I put them?" said she. "Here? Or here?"

"Just there."

She let them stay there in the hollow of her breast.

He laid the box on the dressing-table close to her hand where it searched for pins.

"I've brought you this," he said gently.

She smiled that divine and virgin smile of hers. Anne was big, but her smile was small and close and shy.

"You remembered my birthday?"

"Did you think I should forget?"

She opened the lid with cool unhurried fingers. Under the wrappings of tissue paper and cotton wool, a shape struck clear and firm and familiar to her touch. A sacred thrill ran through her as she felt there the presence of the holy thing, the symbol so dear and so desired that it was divined before seen.

She lifted from the box an old silver crucifix. It must have been the work of some craftsman whose art was pure and fine as the silver he had wrought in. But that was not what Anne saw. She had always found something painful and repellent in those crucifixes of wood which distort and deepen the lines of ivory, or in those of ivory which gives again the very pallor of human death. But the precious metal had somehow eternalised the symbol of the crucified body. She saw more than the torture, the exhaustion, the attenuation. Surely, on the closed eyelids there rested the glory and the peace of divine accomplishment?

She stood still, holding it in her hand and looking at it. Majendie stood still, also looking at her. He was not quite sure whether she were going to accept that gift, whether she would hesitate to take from his profane hands a thing so sacred and so supreme. He was aware that his fate somehow hung on her acceptance, and he waited in silence, lest a word should destroy the work of love in her.

Anne, too (when she could detach her mind from the crucifix), felt that the moment was decisive. To accept that gift, of all gifts, was to lay her spirit under obligation to him. It was more than a surrender of body, heart, or mind. It was to admit him to association with the unspeakably sacred acts of prayer and adoration.

If it were possible that that had been his desire; if he had meant his gift as a tribute, not to her only, but to the spirit of holiness in her; if, in short, he had been serious, then, indeed, she could not hesitate. For, if it were so, her prayer was answered.

She laid down the crucifix and turned to him. They searched each other with their eyes. She saw, without wholly understanding, the pain in his. He saw, also unintelligently, the austerity in hers.

"Are you not going to take it, then?" he said.

"I don't know. Do you realise that you are giving me a very sacred thing?"

"I do."

"And that I can't treat it as I would an ordinary present?"

He lowered his eyelids. "I didn't think you'd want to wear it in your hair, dear."

She was about to ask him what he did mean then; but some instinct held her, told her not to press the sign of grace too hard. She looked at him still more intently. His eyes had disconcerted and baffled her, but now she was sheltered by their lowered lids. Then she noticed for the first time that his face showed the marks of suffering. It was as if it had dropped suddenly the brilliant mask it wore for her, and given up its secret unaware. He had suffered so that he had not slept. It was plain to her in the droop of his eyelids, and in the drawn lines about his eyes and mouth and nostrils. She was touched with tenderness and pity, and a certain unintelligible awe. And she knew her hour. She knew that if she closed her heart now, it would never open to him. She knew that it was his hour as well as hers. She felt, reverently, that it was, above all, God's hour.

She laid her hand on her husband's gift, saying to herself that if she took that crucifix she would be taking him with it into the holy places of her heart.

"I will take it." Her voice came shy and inarticulate as a marriage vow.

"Thank you," he said.

He wondered if she would turn to him with some sign of tenderness, whether she would stoop to him and touch him with her hand or her lips; or whether she looked to him to offer the first caress.

She did nothing. It was as if her intentness, her concentration upon her holy purpose held her. While her soul did but turn to him in the darkness, it kept and would keep their hands and lips apart.

He divined that she was only half-won. But, though her body yet moved in its charmed inviolate circle, he felt dimly that the spiritual barrier was down.

She turned from him and went slowly to the door. He opened it and followed her. On the stairs she parted from him and went alone into his sister's bedroom.

Edith's spine had been hurting her in the night. She lay flat and exhausted, and the embrace of her loving arms was slow and frail.

Edith was what she called "dressed," and waiting for her sister-in-law. The little table by her bed was strewn with the presents she had bought and made for Anne. A birthday was a very serious affair for Edith. She was not content to buy (buying was nothing; anybody could buy); she must also make, and make beautifully. "I mayn't have any legs that can carry me," said Edith; "but I've hands and I will use them. If it wasn't for my hands I'd be nothing but a great lumbering, lazy mass of palpitating heart." But her making had become every year more and more expensive. Her beautiful, pitiful embroideries were paid for in bad nights. And at six o'clock that morning she had given her little dismal cry: "Oh, Nanna, Nanna, my beast of a spine is going to bother me to-day, and it's Anne's birthday!"

"And what else," said Nanna severely, "do you expect, Miss Edith?"

"I didn't expect this. I do believe it's getting worse."

"Worse?" Nanna was contemptuous. "It was worse on Master Walter's birthday last year."

(Last year she had made a waistcoat.)

"I can't think," moaned Edith, "why it's always bad on birthdays."

But however badly "it" might behave in the night, it was never permitted to destroy the spirit of the day.

Anne looked anxiously at the collapsed, exhausted figure in the bed.

"Yes," said Edith, having smiled at her sister-in-law with magnificent mendacity, "you may well look at me. You couldn't make yourself as flat as I am if you tried. There are two books for you, and a thingummy-jig, and a handkerchief to blow your dear nose with."

"Edie—"

"Do you like them?"

"Like them? Oh, you dear—"

"Why don't you have a birthday oftener? It makes you look so pretty, dear."

Anne's heart leaped. Edie's ways, her very words sometimes were like Walter's.

"Has Walter seen you?"

Anne's face became instantly solemn, but it was not sad.

"Edie," she said, "do you know what he has given me!"

"Yes," said Edith. Her eyes searched Anne's eyes with pain in them that was somehow akin to Walter's pain.

"She knows everything," thought Anne, "and it was her idea, then, not his."

"Edith," said she, "was it you who thought of it, or he?"

"I? Never. He didn't say a word about it. He just went and got it. He thought it all out by himself, poor dear."

"Can you think why he thought of it?"

"Yes," said Edith gravely, "I can. Can't you?"

Anne was silent.

"It's very simple. He wants you to trust him a little more, that's all."

Anne's mouth trembled, and she tightened it.

"Are you afraid of him?"

"Yes," she said, "I am."

"Because you think he isn't very spiritual?"

"Perhaps."

"Oh, but he's on his way there," said Edith. "He's human. You've got to be human before you can be spiritual. It's a most important part of the process. Don't you omit it."

"Have I omitted it?"

She stroked one of the thin hands that were out-stretched towards her on the coverlet, and the other closed on her caress. The touch brought the tears into her eyes. She raised her head to keep them from falling.

"Dear," said Edith, and paused and reiterated, "dear, you have about all the big things that I haven't. You're splendid. There's only one thing I want for you. If you could only see how divinely sacred the human part of us is—and how pathetic."

Anne looked at her as she lay there, bright and brave, untroubled by her own mortal pathos. In her, humanity, woman's humanity, was reduced to its simplest expression of spiritual loving and bodily suffering. Anne was a child in her ignorance of the things that had been revealed to Edith lying there.

Looking at her, Anne's tears grew heavy and fell.

"It's your birthday," said Edith softly.

And as she heard Majendie's foot on the stairs Anne dried her eyes on the birthday pocket handkerchief.

"Here she is," said Edith as he entered. "What are you going to do with her? She doesn't have a birthday every day."

"I'm going," he said, "to take her down to breakfast."

Their meals so abounded in occasions for courtesy that they had become profoundly formal. This morning Anne's courtesy was coloured by some emotion that defied analysis. She wore her new mood like a soft veil that heightened her attraction in obscuring it.

He watched her with a baffled preoccupation that kept him unusually quiet. His quietness did him good service with Anne in her new mood.

When the meal was over she rose and went to the window. The sedate Georgian street was full of the day that shone soberly here from the cool clear north.

"What are you thinking of?" said he.

"I'm thinking what a beautiful day it is."

"Yes, isn't it a jolly day?"

"If it's beautiful here, what must it be in the country?"

"The country?" A thought struck him. "I say, would you like to go there?"

"Do you mean to-day?"

Her upper lip lifted, and the two teeth showed again on the pale rose of its twin. In spite of the dignity of her proportions, Anne had the look of a child contemplating some hardly permissible delight.

"Now, this minute. There's a train to Westleydale at nine fifty."

"It would be very nice. But—how about business?"

"Business be—"

"No, no, not that word."

"But it is, you know; it can't help itself. There's a devil in all the offices in Scale at this time of the year."

"Would you like it?"

"I? Rather. I'm on!"

"But—Edith—oh no, we can't."

She turned with a sudden gesture of renunciation, so that she faced him where he stood smiling at her. His face grew grave for her.

"Look here," he said, "you mustn't be morbid about Edith. It isn't necessary. All the time we're gone, she'll be there, in perfect bliss with simply thinking of the good time we're having."

"But her back's bad to-day."

"Then she'll be glad that we're not there to feel it. Her back will add to her happiness, if anything."

She drew in a sharp breath, as if he had hurt her.

"Oh, Walter, how can you?"

He replied with emphasis. "How can I? I can, not because I'm a brute, as you seem to suppose, but because she's a saint and an angel. I take off my hat and go down on my knees when I think of her. Go and put your hat on."

She felt herself diminished, humbled, and in two ways. It was as if he had said: "You are not the saint that Edith is, nor yet the connoisseur in saintship that I am."

She knew that she was not the one; but to the other distinction she certainly fancied that she had the superior claim. And she had never yet come behind him in appreciation of Edith. Besides, she was hurt at being spoken to in that way on her birthday.

Her resentment faded when she found him standing at the foot of the stairs by Edith's door, waiting for her. He looked up at her as she descended, and his eyes brightened with pleasure at the sight.

Edith was charmed with their plan. It might have been conceived as an exquisite favour to herself, by the fine style in which she handled it.

They set out, Majendie carrying the luncheon basket and Anne's coat. He had changed, and appeared in the Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers, and cap he had worn at Scarby. The pang that struck her at the sight of them was softened by her practical perception of their fitness for the adventure. They became him, too, and she had memory of the charm he had once worn for her with that open-air attire.

An hour's journey by rail brought them to the little wayside station. They turned off the high road, walked for ten minutes across an upland field, and came to the bridle-path that led down into the beech-woods of Westleydale, in the heart of the hills.

They followed a mossy trail. The shade fell thin, warm, and coloured, from leaves so tender that the light passed through their half-transparent panes. Overhead there was the delicate scent of green things and of sap, and underfoot the deep smell of moss and moistened earth.

Anne drew the deep breath of delight. She took off her hat and gloves, and moved forward a few steps to a spot where the wood opened and the vivid light received her. Majendie hung back to look at her. She turned and stood before him, superb and still, shrined in a crescent of tall beech stems, column by column, with the light descending on the fine gold of her hair. Nothing in Anne even remotely suggested a sylvan and primeval creature; but, as she stood there in her temperate and alien beauty, she seemed to him to have yielded to a brief enchantment. She threw back her head, as if her white throat drank the sweet air like wine. She held out her white hands, and let the warmth play over them palpably as a touch.

And Majendie longed to take her by those white hands and draw her to him. If he could have trusted her; but some instinct plucked him backward, saying to him: "Not yet."

A mossy rise under a beech-tree offered itself to Anne as a suitable throne for the regal woman that she was. He spread out her coat, and she made room for him beside her. He sat for a long time without speaking. The powers which were working that day for Majendie gave to him that subtle silence. He had, at most times, an inexhaustible capacity for keeping still.

Above them, just discernible through the tree-tops, veiled by a gauze of dazzling air, the hill brooded in its majestic dream. Its green arms, plunging to the valley, gathered them and shut them in.

Majendie's figure was not diminished by the background. The smallest nervous movement on his part would have undone him, but he did not move. His profound stillness, suggesting an interminable patience, gave him a beautiful immensity of his own.

Anne, left in her charmed, inviolate circle, surrendered sweetly to the spirit of Westleydale.

The place was peace folded upon the breast of peace.

Presently she spoke, calling his name, as if out of the far-off unutterable peace.

"Walter, it was kind of you to bring me here."

"I am so glad you like it."

"I do indeed."

He tried to say more, but his heart choked him.

She closed her eyes, and the peace poured over her, and sank in. Her heart beat quietly.

She opened her eyes and turned them on her husband. She knew that it was his gaze that had compelled them to open. She smiled to herself, like a young girl, shyly but happily aware of him, and turned from him to her contemplation of the woods.

Anne had always rather prided herself on her susceptibility to the beauty of nature, but it had never before reached her with this poignant touch. Hitherto she had drawn it in with her eyes only; now it penetrated her through every nerve. She was vaguely but deliciously aware of her own body as a part of it, and of her husband's joy in contemplating her.

"He thinks me good-looking," she said to herself, and the thought came to her as a revelation.

Then her young memory woke again and thrust at her.

"He thinks me good-looking. That's why he married me."

She longed to find out if it were so.

"Walter," said she, "I want to ask you a question."

"Well—if it's an easy one."

"It isn't—very. What made you want to marry me?"

He paused a moment, searching for the truth.

"Your goodness."

"Is that really true?"

"To the best of my belief, madam, it is."

"But there are so many other women better than me."

"Possibly. I haven't been happy enough to meet them."

"And if you had met them?"

"As far as I can make out, I shouldn't have fallen in love with them. I shouldn't have fallen in love with you, if it hadn't been for your goodness. But I shouldn't have fallen in love with your goodness in any other woman."

"Have you known many other women?"

"One way and another, in the course of my life—yes. And what I liked so much about you was your difference from those other women. You gave me rest from them and their ways. They bored me even when I was half in love with them, and made me restless for them even when I wasn't a little bit. It was as if they were always expecting something from me—I couldn't for the life of me tell what—always on the look out, don't you know, for some mysterious moment that never arrived."

She thought she knew. She felt that he was describing vaguely and with incomparable innocence the approaches of the ladies who had once designed to marry him. He had never seen through them; they (and they must have been so obvious, those ladies) had remained for him inscrutable, mysterious. He could deal competently with effects, but he was not clever at assigning causes.

He seemed conscious of her reflections. "They were quite nice, don't you know. Only they couldn't let you alone. You let me alone so perfectly. Being with you was peace."

"I see," she said quietly. "It was peace. That was all."

"Oh, was it? That was only the beginning, if you must know how it began."

"It began," she murmured, "in peace. That was what struck you most in me. I must have seemed to you at peace, then."

"You did—you did. Weren't you?"

"I must have been. But I've forgotten. It's so long ago. There's peace here, though. Why didn't we choose this place instead of Scarby?"

"I wish we had. I say—are you never going to forget that?"

"I've forgiven it. I might forget it if I could only understand."

"Understand what?"

"How you could be capable of caring for me—like that—and yet—"

"But the two things are so entirely different. It's impossible to explain to you how different. Heaven forbid that you should understand the difference."

"I understand enough to know—"

"You understand enough to know nothing. You must simply take my word for it. Besides, the one thing's an old thing, over and done with."

"Over and done with. But if the two things are so different, how can you be sure?"

"That sounds awfully clever of you, but I'm hanged if I know what you mean."

"I mean, how can you tell that it—the old thing—never would come back?"

It was clever of her. He realised that he had to deal now with a more complete and complex creature than Anne had been.

"How could it?" he asked.

"If she came back—"

"Never. And if it did—"

"Ah, if it did—"

"It couldn't in this case—my case—your case—"

"Her case—" she whispered.

"Her case? She hasn't got one. She simply doesn't exist. She might come back as much as she pleased, and still she wouldn't exist. Is that what you've been afraid of all the time?"

"I never was really afraid till now."

"What you're afraid of couldn't happen. You can put that out of your head for ever. If I could mention you in the same sentence as that woman you should know why I am so certain. As it is, I must ask you again to take my word for it."

He paused.

"But, since you have raised the question—and it's interesting, too—I knew a man once—not a 'bad' man—to whom that very thing did happen. And it didn't mean that he'd left off caring for his wife. On the contrary, he was still insanely fond of her."

"What did it mean, then?"

"That she'd left off showing that she cared for him. And he cared more for her, that man, after having left her, than he did before. In its way it was a sort of test."

"I pray heaven—" said Anne; but she was too greatly shocked by the anecdote to shape her prayer.

Majendie, feeling that the time, the place, and her mood were propitious for the exposition, went on.

"There's another man I know. He was very fond of Edie. He's fond of her still. He'll come and sit for hours playing backgammon with her. And yet all his fondness for her hasn't kept him entirely straight. But he'd have been as straight as anybody if he could have married her."

"But what does all this prove?"

"It proves nothing," he said almost passionately, "except that these two things, just because they're different, are not so incompatible as you seem to think."

"Did Edie care for that man?"

"I believe so."

"Ah, don't you see? There's the difference. What made Edie a saint made him a sinner."

"I doubt if Edie would look on it quite in that light. She thinks it was uncommonly hard on him."

"Does she know?"

"Oh, there's no end to the things that Edie knows."

"And she loves him in spite of it?"

"Yes. I suppose there's no end to that either."

No end to her loving. That was the secret, then, of Edie's peace.

Anne meditated upon that, and when she spoke again her voice rang on its vibrating, sub-passionate note.

"And you said that I gave you rest. You were different."

He made as if he would draw nearer to her, and refrained. The kind heart of Nature was in league with his. Nature, having foreknowledge of her own hour, warned him that his hour was not yet.

And so he waited, while Nature, mindful of her purpose, began in Anne Majendie her holy, beneficent work. The soul of the place was charged with memories, with presciences, with prophecies. A thousand woodland influences, tender timidities, shy assurances, wooed her from her soul. They pleaded sweetly, persistently, till Anne's brooding face wore the flush of surrender to the mysteries of earth.

The spell was broken by a squirrel's scurrying flight in the boughs above them. Anne looked up, and laughed, and their moment passed them by.



CHAPTER X

"Are you tired?" he asked.

They had walked about the wood, made themselves hungry, and lunched like labourers at high noon.

"No, I'm only thirsty. Do you think there's a cottage anywhere where you could get me some water?"

"Yes, there's one somewhere about. I'll try and find it if you'll sit here and rest till I come back."

She waited. He came back, but without the water. His eyes sparkled with some mysterious, irrepressible delight.

"Can't you find it?"

"Rather. I say, do come and look. There's such a pretty sight."

She rose and went with him. Up a turning in the dell, about fifty yards from their tree, a long grassy way cut sheer through a sheet of wild hyacinths. It ran as if between two twin borders of blue mist, that hemmed it in and closed it by the illusion of their approach. On either side the blue mist spread, and drifted away through the inlets of the wood, and became a rarer and rarer atmosphere, torn by the tree-trunks and the fern. The path led to a small circular clearing, a shaft that sucked the daylight down. It was as if the sunshine were being poured in one stream from a flooded sky, and danced in the dark cup earth held for it. The trees grew close and tall round the clearing. Light dripped from their leaves and streamed down their stems, turning their grey to silver. The bottom of the cup was a level floor of grass that had soaked in light till it shone like emerald. A stone cottage faced the path; so small that a laburnum brushed its roof and a may-tree laid a crimson face against the grey gable of its side. The patch of garden in front was stuffed with wall-flowers and violets. The sun lay warm on them; their breath stirred in the cup, like the rich, sweet fragrance of the wine of day.

Majendie grasped Anne's arm and led her forward.

In the middle of the green circle, under the streaming sun, cradled in warm grass, a girl baby sat laughing and fondling her naked feet. She laughed as she lay on her back and opened one folded, wrinkled foot to the sun; she laughed as she threw herself forward and beat her knees with the outspread palms of her hands; she laughed as she rocked her soft body to and fro from her rosy hips; then she stopped laughing suddenly, and began crooning to herself a delicious, unintelligible song.

"Look," said Majendie, "that's what I wanted to show you."

"Oh—oh—oh—" said Anne, and looked, and stood stock-still.

The beatitude of that adorable little figure possessed the scene. Green earth and blue sky were so much shelter and illumination to its pure and solitary joy.

"Did you ever see anything so heart-rending?" said Majendie. "That anything could be so young!"

Anne shook her head, dumb with the fascination.

As they approached again, the little creature rolled on its waist, and crawled over the grass to her feet.

"The little lamb—" said she, and stooped, and lifted it.

It turned to her, cuddling. Through the thin muslin of her bodice she could feel the pressure of its tender palms.

Majendie stood close to her and tried gently to detach and possess himself of the delicate clinging fingers. But his eyes were upon Anne's eyes. They drew her; she looked up, her eyes flashed to the meeting-point; his widened in one long penetrating gaze.

A sudden pricking pain went through her, there where the pink and flaxen thing lay sun-warm and life-warm to her breast.

At first she did not heed it. She stood hushed, attentive to the prescience that woke in her; surrendered to the secret, with desire that veiled itself to meet its unveiled destiny.

Then the veil fell.

The eyes that looked at her grew tender, and before their tenderness the veil, the veil of her desire that had hidden him from her, fell.

Her face burned, and she hid it against the child's face as it burrowed into the softness of her breast. When she would have parted the child from her, it clung.

She laughed. "Release me." And he undid the clinging arms, and took the child from her, and laid it again in the cradling grass.

"It's conceived a violent passion for you," said he.

"They always do," said she serenely.

The door of the cottage was open. The mother stood on the threshold, shading her eyes and wondering at them. She gave Anne water, hospitably, in an old china cup.

When Anne had drunk she handed the cup to her husband. He drank with his eyes fixed on her over the brim, and gave it to her again. He wondered whether she would drink from it after him (Anne was excessively fastidious). To his intense satisfaction, she drank, draining the last drop.

They went back together to their tree. On the way he stopped to gather wild hyacinths for her. He gathered slowly, in a grave and happy passion of preoccupation. Anne stood erect in the path and watched him, and laughed the girl's laugh that he longed to hear.

It was as if she saw him for the first time through Edith's eyes, with so tender an intelligence did she take in his attitude, the absurd, the infantile intentness of his stooping figure, the still more absurdly infantile emotion of his hands. It was the very same attitude which had melted Edith, that unhappy day when they had watched him as he walked disconsolate in the garden, and she, his wife, had hardened her heart against him. She remembered Edith's words to her not two hours ago: "If you could only see how unspeakably sacred the human part of us is, and how pathetic." Surely she saw.

The deep feeling and enchantment of the woods was upon her. He was sacred to her; and for pathos, it seemed to her that there was poured upon his stooping body all the pathos of all the living creatures of God.

She saw deeper. In the illumination that rested on him there, she saw the significance of that carelessness, that happiness of his which had once troubled her. It was simply that his experience, his detestable experience, had had no power to harm his soul. Through it all he had preserved, or, by some miracle of God, recovered an incorruptible innocence. She said to herself: "Why should I not love him? His heart must be as pure as the heart of that little blessed child."

The warning voice of the wisdom she had learnt from him whispered: "And it rests with you to keep him so."

He led her to her tree, where she seated herself regally as before. He poured his sheaves of hyacinths as tribute into her lap. As his hands touched hers her cold face flushed again and softened. He stretched himself beside her and love stirred in her heart, unforbidden, as in a happy dream. He watched the movements of her delicate fingers as they played with the tangled hyacinth bells. Her hands were wet with the thick streaming juice of the torn stalks; she stretched them out to him helplessly. He knelt before her, and spread his handkerchief on his knees, and took her hands and wiped them. She let them rest in his for a moment, and, with a low, panting cry, he bowed his head and covered them with kisses.

At his cry her lips parted. And as her soul had called to him across the spiritual ramparts, so her eyes said to him: "Come"; and he knew that with all her body and her soul she yearned to him and consented.

He held her tight by the wrists and drew her to him; and she laid her arms lightly on his neck and kissed him.

"I'm glad now," she whispered, "that Edith didn't tell me. She knew you. Oh, my dear, she knew."

And to herself she said proudly: "It rests with me."



BOOK II



CHAPTER XI

It was October, five months after Anne's birthday. She was not to know again the mood which determined her complete surrender. Supreme moods can never be recaptured or repeated. The passion that inspires them is unique, self-sacrificial, immortal only through fruition; doomed to pass and perish in its exaltation. She would know tenderness, but never just that tenderness; gladness, but never that gladness; peace, but never the peace that possessed her in the woods at Westleydale.

The new soul in her moved steadily, to a rhythm which lacked the diviner thrill of the impulse which had given it birth. It was but seldom that the moment revived in memory. If Anne had accounted to herself for that day, she would have said that they had taken the nine-fifty train to Westleydale, that they had had a nice luncheon, that the weather was exceptionally fine, and that well, yes, certainly, that day had been the beginning of their entirely satisfactory relations. Anne's mind had a tendency to lapse into the commonplace when not greatly stirred. Happily for her, she had a refuge from it in her communion with the Unseen.

Only at times was she conscious of a certain foiled expectancy. For the greater while it seemed to her that she had attained an indestructible spiritual content.

She conceived a profound affection for her home. The house in Prior Street became the centre of her earthward thoughts, and she seldom left it for very long. Her health remained magnificent; her nature being adapted to an undisturbed routine, appeased by the well-ordered, even passage of her days.

She had made a household religion for herself, and would have suffered in departing from it. To be always down before her husband for eight-o'clock breakfast; to sit with Edith from twelve till luncheon time, and in the early afternoon; to spend her evenings with her husband, reading aloud or talking, or sitting silent when silence soothed him; these things had become more sacred and imperative than her attendance at St. Saviour's. The hours of even-song struck for her no more.

For, above all, she had made a point of always being at home in time for Majendie's return from his office. At five o'clock she was ready for him, beside her tea-table, irreproachably dressed. Her friends complained that they had lost sight of her. Regularly at a quarter to five she would forsake the drawing-rooms of Thurston Square. However absorbing Mrs. Eliott's conversation, towards the quarter, the tender abstraction of Anne's manner showed plainly that her spirit had surrendered to another charm. Mrs. Eliott, in letting her go, had the air of a person serenely sane, indulgent to a persistent and punctual obsession. Anne divided her friends into those who understood and those who didn't. Fanny Eliott would never understand. But little Mrs. Gardner, through the immortality of her bridal spirit, understood completely. And for Anne Mrs. Gardner's understanding of her amounted to an understanding of her husband. Anne's heart went out to Mrs. Gardner.

Not that she saw much of her, either. She had grown impatient of interests that lay outside her home. Once she had decided to give herself up to her husband, other people's claims appeared as an impertinence beside that perfection of possession.

She was less vividly aware of her own perfect possession of him. Majendie was hardly aware of it himself. His happiness was so profound that he had not yet measured it. He, too, had slipped into the same imperturbable routine. It was seldom that he kept her waiting past five o'clock. He hated the people who made business appointments with him for that hour. His old associates saw little of him, and his club knew him no more. He preferred Anne's society to that of any other person. They had no more fear of each other. He saw that she was beginning to forget.

In one thing only he was disappointed. The trembling woman who had held him in her arms at Westleydale had never shown herself to him again. She had been called, created, for an end beyond herself. The woman he had married again was pure from passion, and of an uncomfortable reluctance in the giving and taking of caresses. He forced himself to respect her reluctance. He had simply to accept this emotional parsimony as one of the many curious facts about Anne. He no longer went to Edith for an explanation of them, for the Anne he had known in Westleydale was too sacred to be spoken of. An immense reverence possessed him when he thought of her. As for the actual present Anne, loyalty was part of the large simplicity of his nature, and he could not criticise her. Remembering Westleydale, he told himself that her blanched susceptibility was tenderness at white heat. If she said little, he argued that (like himself) she felt the more. And at times she could say perfect things.

"I wonder, Nancy," he once said to her, "if you know how divinely sweet your voice is?"

"I shall begin to think it is, if you think so," said she.

"And would you think yourself beautiful, if I thought so?"

"Very beautiful. At any rate, as beautiful as I want to be."

He could not control the demonstration provoked by that admission, and she asked him if he were coming to church with her to-morrow.

His Nancy chose her moments strangely.

But not for worlds would he have admitted that she was deficient in a sense of humour. She had her small hilarities that passed for it. Keenness in that direction would have done violence to the repose and sweetness of her blessed presence. The peace of it remained with him during his hours of business.

Anne did not like his business. But, in spite of it, she was proud of him, of his appearance, his charm, his distinction, his entire superiority to even the aristocracy of Scale.

She no longer resented his indifference to her friends in Thurston Square, since it meant that he desired to have her to himself. Of his own friends he had seen little, and she nothing. If she had not pressed Fanny Eliott on him, he had spared her Mrs. Lawson Hannay and Mrs. Dick Ransome. She had been fortunate enough to find both these ladies out when she returned their calls. And Majendie had spoken of his most intimate friend, Charlie Gorst, as absent on a holiday in Norway.

It was, therefore, in a mood of more than usual concession that she proposed to return, now in October, the second advance made to her by Mrs. Hannay in July.

Majendie was relieved to think that he would no longer be compelled to perjure himself on Anne's account. The Hannays had frequently reproached him with his wife's unreadiness in response, and (as he had told her) he had exhausted all acceptable explanations of her conduct. He had "worked" her headaches "for all they were worth" with Hannay; for weeks he had kept Hannay's wife from calling, by the fiction, discreetly presented, of a severe facial neuralgia; and his last shameless intimation, that Anne was "rather shy, you know," had been received with a respectful incredulity that left him with nothing more to say.

Mrs. Hannay was not at home when Anne called, for Anne had deliberately avoided her "day." But Mrs. Hannay was irrepressibly forgiving, and Anne found herself invited to dine at the Hannays' with her husband early in the following week. It was hardly an hour since she had left Mrs. Hannay's doorstep when the pressing, the almost alarmingly affectionate little note came hurrying after her.

"I'll go, dear, if you really want me to," said she.

"Well—I think, if you don't mind. The Hannays have been awfully good to me."

So they went.

"Don't snub the poor little woman too unmercifully," was Edith's parting charge.

"I promise you I'll not snub her at all," said Anne.

"You can't," said Majendie. "She's like a soft sofa cushion with lots of frills on. You can sit on her, as you sit on a sofa cushion, and she's as plump, and soft, and accommodating as ever the next day."

The Hannays lived in the Park.

Majendie talked a great deal on the way there. His supporting and attentive manner was not quite the stimulant he had meant it to be. Anne gathered that the ordeal would be trying; he was so eager to make it appear otherwise.

"Once you're there, it won't be bad, you know, at all. The Hannays are really all right. They'll ask the very nicest people they know to meet you. They think you're doing them a tremendous honour, you know, and they'll rise to it. You'll see how they'll rise."

Mrs. Hannay had every appearance of having risen to it. Anne's entrance (she was impressive in her entrances) set the standard high; yet Mrs. Hannay rose. When agreeably excited Mrs. Hannay was accustomed to move from one end of her drawing-room to the other with the pleasing and impalpable velocity of all soft round bodies inspired by gaiety. So exuberant was the softness of the little lady and so voluminous her flying frills, that at these moments her descent upon her guests appeared positively winged like the descent of cherubim. To-night she advanced slowly from her hearth-rug with no more than the very slightest swaying and rolling of all her softness, the very faintest tremor of her downy wings. Mrs. Hannay's face was the round face of innocence, the face of a cherub with blown cheeks and lips shaped for the trumpet.

"My dear Mrs. Majendie—at last." She retained Mrs. Majendie's hand for the moment of presenting her to her husband. By this gesture she appropriated Mrs. Majendie, taking her under her small cherubic wing. "Wallie, how d'you do?" Her left hand furtively appropriated Mrs. Majendie's husband. Anne marked the familiarity with dismay. It was evident that at the Hannays' Walter was in the warm lap of intimacy.

It was evident, too, that Mr. Hannay had married considerably beneath him. Anne owned that he had a certain dignity, and that there was something rather pleasing in his loose, clean-shaven face. The sharp slenderness of youth was now vanishing in a rosy corpulence, corpulence to which Mr. Hannay resigned himself without a struggle. But above it the delicate arch of his nose attested the original refinement of his type. His mouth was not without sweetness, Mr. Hannay being as indulgent to other people as he was to himself.

He received Anne with a benign air; he assured her of his delight in making her acquaintance; and he refrained from any allusions to the long delay of his delight.

Little Mrs. Hannay was rolling softly in another direction.

"Canon Wharton, let me present you to Mrs. Walter Majendie."

She had risen to Canon Wharton. For she had said to her husband: "You must get the Canon. She can't think us such a shocking bad lot if we have him." Her face expressed triumph in the capture of Canon Wharton, triumph in the capture of Mrs. Walter Majendie, triumph in the introduction. Owing to the Hannays' determination to rise to it, the dinner-party, in being rigidly select, was of necessity extremely small.

"Miss Mildred Wharton—Sir Rigley Barker—Mr. Gorst. Now you all know each other."

The last person introduced had lingered with a certain charming diffidence at Mrs. Majendie's side. He was a man of about her husband's age, or a little younger, fair and slender, with a restless, flushed face and brilliant eyes.

"I can't tell you what a pleasure this is, Mrs. Majendie."

He had an engaging voice and a still more engaging smile.

"You may have heard about me from your husband. I was awfully sorry to miss you when I called before I went to Norway. I only came back this morning, but I made Hannay invite me."

Anne murmured some suitable politeness. She said afterwards that her instinct had warned her against Mr. Gorst, with his restlessness and brilliance; but, as a matter of fact, her instinct had done nothing of the sort, and his manners had prejudiced her in his favour. Fanny Eliott had told her that he belonged to a very old Lincolnshire family. There was a distinction about him. And he really had a particularly engaging smile.

So she received him amiably; so amiably that Majendie, who had been observing their encounter with an intent and rather anxious interest, appeared finally reassured. He joined them, releasing himself adroitly from Sir Rigley Barker.

"How's Edith?" said Mr. Gorst.

His use of the name and something in his intonation made Anne attentive.

"She's better," said Majendie. "Come and see her soon."

"Oh, rather. I'll come round to-morrow. If," he added, "Mrs. Majendie will permit me."

"Mrs. Majendie," said her husband, "will be delighted."

Anne smiled assent. Her amiability extended even to Mrs. Hannay, who had risen to it, so far, well.

During dinner Anne gave her attention to her right-hand neighbour, Canon Wharton; and Mrs. Hannay, looking down from her end of the table, saw her selection justified. In rising to the Canon she had risen her highest; for the ex-member hardly counted; he was a fallen star. But Canon Wharton, the Vicar of All Souls, stood on an eminence, social and spiritual, in Scale. He had built himself a church in the new quarter of the town, and had filled it to overflowing by the power of his eloquence. Lawson Hannay, in a moment of unkind insight, had described the Canon as "a speculative builder"; but he lent him money for his building, and liked him none the less.

Out of the pulpit the Vicar of All Souls was all things to all men. In the pulpit he was nothing but the Vicar of All Souls. He stood there for a great light in Scale, "holding," as he said, "the light, carrying the light, battling for light in the darkness of that capital of commerce, that stronghold of materialism, founded on money, built up in money, cemented with money!" He snarled out the word "money," and flung it in the face of his fashionable congregation; he gnashed his teeth over it; he shook his fist at them; and they rose to his mood, delighting in little Tommy Wharton's pluck in "giving it them hot." He was always giving it them hot, warming himself at his own fire. And then little Tommy Wharton slipped out of his little surplice and his little cassock, and into the Hannays' house for whiskey and soda. He could drink peg for peg with Lawson Hannay, without turning a hair, while poor Lawson turned many hairs, till his little wife ran in and hid the whiskey and shook her handkerchief at the little Canon, and "shooed" him merrily away. And Lawson, big, good-natured Lawson, would lend him more "money" to build his church with.

So the Vicar of All Souls, who aspired to be all things to all men, was hand in glove with the Lawson Hannays. He had occasionally been known to provide for the tables of the poor, but he dearly loved to sit at the tables of the rich; and he justified his predilection by the highest example.

Anne, who knew the Canon by his spiritual reputation only, turned to him with interest. Her eye, keen to discern these differences, saw at once that he was a man of the people. He had the unfinished features, the stunted form of an artisan; his body sacrificed, his admirers said, to the energies of his mighty brain. His face was a heavy, powerful oval, bilious-coloured, scarred with deep lines, and cleft by the wide mouth of an orator, a mouth that had acquired the appearance of strength through the Canon's habit of bringing his lips together with a snap at the close of his periods. His eyes were a strange, opaque grey, but the clever Canon made them seem almost uncomfortably penetrating by simply knitting his eyebrows in a savage pent-house over them. They now looked forth at Anne as if the Canon knew very well that her soul had a secret, and that it would not long be hidden from him.

They talked about the Eliotts, for the Canon's catholicity bridged the gulf between Thurston Square and vociferous, high-living, fashionable Scale. He had lately succeeded (by the power of his eloquence) in winning over Mrs. Eliott from St. Saviour's to All Souls. He hoped also to win over Mrs. Eliott's distinguished friend. For the Canon was mortal. He had yielded to the unspiritual seduction of filling All Souls by emptying other men's churches. Lawson Hannay smiled on the parson's success, hoping (he said) to see his money back again.

Money or no money, he left him a clear field with Mrs. Majendie. Ladies, when they were pretty, appealed to Lawson as part of the appropriate decoration of a table; but, much as he loved their charming society, he loved his dinner more. He loved it with a certain pure extravagance, illuminated by thought and imagination. Mrs. Hannay was one with him in this affection. Her heart shared it; her fancy ministered to it, rising higher and higher in unwearying flights. It was a link between them; almost (so fine was the passion) an intellectual tie. But reticence was not in Hannay's nature; and his emotion affected Anne very unpleasantly. She missed the high lyric note in it. All epicurean pleasures, even so delicate and fantastic a joy as Hannay's in his dinner, appeared gross to Anne.

Majendie at the other end of the table caught sight of her detached, unhappy look, and became detached and unhappy himself, till Mrs. Hannay rallied him on his abstraction.

"If you are in love, my dear Wallie," she whispered, "you needn't show it so much. It's barely decent."

"Isn't it? Anyhow, I hope it's quite decently bare," he answered, tempted by her folly. They were gay at Mrs. Hannay's end of the table. But Anne, who watched her husband intently, looked in vain for that brilliance which had distinguished him the other night, when he dined in Thurston Square. These Hannays, she said to herself, made him dull.

Now, though Anne didn't in the least want to talk to Mr. Hannay, Mr. Hannay displeased her by not wanting to talk more to her. Not that he talked very much to anybody. Now and then the Canon's niece, Mildred Wharton, the pretty girl on his left, moved him to a high irrelevance, in those rare moments when she was not absorbed in Mr. Gorst. Pretty Mildred and Mr. Gorst were flirting unabashed behind the roses, and it struck Anne that the Canon kept an alarmed and watchful eye upon their intercourse.

To Anne the dinner was intolerably long. She tried to be patient with it, judging that its length was a measure of the height her hosts had risen to. There she did them an injustice; for in the matter of a menu the Hannays could not rise; for they lived habitually on a noble elevation.

At the other end of the table Mrs. Hannay called gaily on her guests to eat and drink. But, when the wine went round, Anne noticed that she whispered to the butler, and after that, the butler only made a feint of filling his master's glass, and turned a politely deaf ear to his protests. And then her voice rose.

"Lawson, that pineapple ice is delicious. Gould, hand the pineapple ice to Mr. Hannay. I adore pineapple ice," said Mrs. Hannay. "Wallie, you're drinking nothing. Fill Mr. Majendie's glass, Gould, fill it—fill it." She was the immortal soul of hospitality, was Mrs. Hannay.

In the drawing-room Mrs. Hannay again took possession of Anne and led her to the sofa. She fairly enthroned her there; she hovered round her; she put cushions at her head, and more cushions under her feet; for Mrs. Hannay liked to be comfortable herself, and to see every one comfortable about her. "You come," said she, "and sit down by me on this sofa, and let's have a cosy talk. That's it. Only you want another cushion. No?—Do—Won't you really? Then it's four for me," said Mrs. Hannay, supporting herself in various postures of experimental comfort, "one for my back, two for my fat sides, and one for my head. Now I'm comfy. I adore cushions, don't you? My husband says I'm a little down cushion myself, so I suppose that's why."

Anne, in her mood, had crushed many innocent vulgarities before now; but she owned that she could no more have snubbed Mrs. Hannay effectually than you could snub a little down cushion. It would be impossible, she thought, to make any impression at all on that yielding surface. Impossible to take any impression from her, to say where her gaiety ended and her vulgarity began.

"Isn't it funny?" the little lady went on, unconscious of Mrs. Majendie's attitude. "My husband's your husband's oldest friend. So I think you and I ought to be friends too."

Anne's face intimated that she hardly considered the chain of reasoning unbreakable; but Mrs. Hannay continued to play cheerful elaborations on the theme of friendship, till her husband appeared with the other three men. He had his hand on Majendie's shoulder, and Mrs. Hannay's soft smile drew Mrs. Majendie's attention to this manifestation of intimacy. And it dawned on Anne that Mrs. Hannay's gaiety would not end here; though it was here, with the mixing of the company, that her vulgarity would begin.

"Did you ever see such a pair? I tell Lawson he's fonder of Wallie than he is of me. I believe he'd go down on his knees and black his boots for nothing, if he asked him. I'd do it myself, only you mustn't tell Lawson I said so." She paused. "I think Lawson wants to come and have a little talk with you."

Hannay approached heavily, and his wife gave up her place to him, cushions and all. He seated himself heavily. His eyes wandered heavily to the other side of the room, following Majendie. And as they rested on his friend there was a light in them that redeemed their heaviness.

He had come to Mrs. Majendie prepared for weighty utterance.

"That man," said Hannay, "is the best man I know. You've married, dear lady, my dearest and most intimate friend. He's a saint—a Bayard." He flung the name at her defiantly, and with a gesture he emphasised the crescendo of his thought. "A preux chevalier, sans peur" said Mr. Hannay, "et sans reproche."

Having delivered his soul, he sat, still heavily, in silence.

Anne repressed the rising of her indignation. To her it was as if he had been defending her husband against some accusation brought by his wife.

And so, indeed, he was. Poor Hannay had been conscious of her attitude—conscious under her pure and austere eyes, of his own shortcomings, and it struck him that Majendie needed some defence against her judgment of his taste in friendship.

When the door closed behind the Majendies, Mr. Gorst was left the last lingering guest.

"Poor Wallie," said Mrs. Hannay.

"Poor Wallie," said Mr. Hannay, and sighed.

"What do you think of her?" said the lady to Mr. Gorst.

"Oh, I think she's magnificent."

"Do you think he'll be able to live up to it?"

"Why not?" said Mr. Gorst cheerfully.

"Well, it wasn't very gay for him before he married, and I don't imagine it's going to be any gayer now."

"Now" said Mr. Hannay, "I understand what's meant by the solemnisation of holy matrimony. That woman would solemnise a farce at the Vaudeville, with Gwen Richards on."

"She very nearly solemnised my dinner," said Mrs. Hannay.

"She doesn't know," said Mr. Hannay, "what a dinner is. She's got no appetite herself, and she tried to take mine away from me. A regular dog-in-the-manger of a woman."

"Oh, come, you know," said Gorst. "She can't be as bad as all that. Edith's awfully fond of her."

"And that's good enough for you?" said Mrs. Hannay.

"Yes. That's good enough for me. I like her," said Gorst stoutly; and Mrs. Hannay hid in her pocket-handkerchief a face quivering with mirth.

But Gorst, as he departed, turned on the doorstep and repeated, "Honestly, I like her."

"Well, honestly," said Mr. Hannay, "I don't." And, lost in gloomy forebodings for his friend, he sought consolation in whiskey and soda.

Mrs. Hannay took a seat beside him.

"And what did you think of the dinner?" said she.

"It was a dead failure, Pussy."

"You old stupid, I mean the dinner, not the dinner-party."

Mrs. Hannay rubbed her soft, cherubic face against his sleeve, and as she did so she gently removed the whiskey from his field of vision. She was a woman of exquisite tact.

"Oh, the dinner, my plump Pussy-cat, was a dream—a happy dream."



CHAPTER XII

"There are moments, I admit," said Majendie, "when Hannay saddens me."

Anne had drawn him into discussing at breakfast-time their host and hostess of the night before.

"Shall you have to see very much of them?" She had made up her mind that she would see very little, or nothing, of the Hannays.

"Well, I haven't, lately, have I?" said he, and she owned that he had not.

"How you ever could—" she began, but he stopped her.

"Oh well, we needn't go into that."

It seemed to her that there was something dark and undesirable behind those words, something into which she could well conceive he would not wish to go. It never struck her that he merely wished to put an end to the discussion.

She brooded over it, and became dejected. The great tide of her trouble had long ago ebbed out of her sight. Now it was as if it had turned, somewhere on the edge of the invisible, and was creeping back again. She wished she had never seen or heard of the Hannays—detestable people.

She betrayed something of this feeling to Edith, who was impatient for an account of the evening. (It was thus that Edith entered vicariously into life.)

"Did you expect me to enjoy it?" she replied to the first eager question.

"No, I don't know that I did. I should have enjoyed it very much indeed."

"I don't believe you."

"Was there anybody there that you disliked so much?"

"The Hannays were there. It was enough."

"You liked Mr. Gorst?"

"Yes. He was different."

"Poor Charlie. I'm glad you liked him."

"I don't like him any better for meeting him there, my dear."

"Don't say that to Walter, Nancy."

"I have said it. How Walter can care for those people is a mystery to me."

"He ought to be ashamed of himself if he didn't. Lawson Hannay has been a good friend to him."

"Do you mean that he's under any obligation to him?"

"Yes. Obligations, my dear, that none of us can ever repay."

"It's intolerable!" said Anne.

"Is it? Wait till you know what the obligations are. That man you dislike so much stood by Walter when your friends the Eliotts, my child, turned their virtuous backs on him—when none of his own people, even, would lend him a helping hand. It was Lawson Hannay who saved him."

"Saved him?"

"Saved him. Moved heaven and earth to get him out of that woman's clutches."

Anne shook her head, and put her hands over her eyes to dispel her vision of him. Edith laughed.

"You can't see Mr. Hannay moving heaven?"

"No, really I can't."

"Well, I saw him. At least, if he didn't move heaven, he moved earth. When nothing else could shake her hold, he bought her off."

"Bought—her—off?"

"Yes, bought her—paid her money to go. And she went."

"He owes him money, then?"

"Money, and a great many other things beside. You don't like it?"

"I can't bear it."

"Of course you can't. It hurts your pride. It hurt mine badly. But my pride has had to go down in the dust before Lawson Hannay."

Anne raised her head as if she refused to lower her pride an inch to him. She was trying to put the whole episode behind her, as it had come before her. She had nothing whatever to do with it. Edith, of course, had to be grateful. She was not bound by the same obligation. But she was determined that they should be quit of the Hannays. She would make Walter pay back that money.

Meanwhile Edith's eyes filled with tears at the recollection. "Lawson Hannay may not have been a very good man himself—I believe at one time he wasn't. But he loved his friend, and he didn't want to see him going the same way."

"The same way? That means that, if it hadn't been for Mr. Hannay, he would never have met her."

"Mr. Hannay did his best to prevent his meeting her. He knew what she was, and Walter didn't. He took him off in his yacht for weeks at a time, to get him out of her way. When she followed him he brought him back. When she persecuted him—well, I've told you what he did."

Anne lifted her hand in supplication, and rose and went to the open window, as if, after that recital, she thirsted for fresh air. Edith smiled, in spite of herself, at her sister-in-law's repudiation of the subject.

"Poor Mr. Hannay," said she, "the worst you can say of him now is that he eats and drinks a little more than's good for him."

"And that he's married a wife who sets him the example," said Anne, returning from the window-sill refreshed.

"She keeps him straight, dear."

"Edith! I shall never understand you. You're angelically good. But it's horrible, the things you take for granted. 'She keeps him straight!'"

"You think I take for granted a natural tendency to crookedness. I don't—I don't. What I take for granted is a natural tendency to straightness, when it gets its way. It doesn't always get it, though, especially in a town like Scale."

"I wish we were out of it."

"So did I, dear, once; but I don't now. We must make the best of it."

"Has Walter paid any of that money back to Mr. Hannay?"

Edith looked up at her sister-in-law, startled by the hardness in her voice. She had meant to spare Anne's pride the worst blow, but something in her question stirred the fire that slept in Edith.

"No," she said, "he hasn't. He was going to, but Mr. Hannay cancelled the debt, in order that he might marry—that he might marry you."

Anne drew back as if Edith had struck her bodily. She, then, had been bought, too, with Mr. Hannay's money. Without it, Walter could not have afforded to marry her; for she was poor.

She sat silent, until her self-appointed hour with Edith ended; and then, still silently, she left the room.

And Edith turned her cheek on her cushions and sobbed weakly to herself. "Walter would never forgive me if he knew I'd told her that. It was awful of me. But Anne would have provoked the patience of a saint."

Anne owned that Edith was a saint, and that the provocation was extreme.

In the afternoon, Edith, at her own request, was forgiven, and Anne, by way of proving and demonstrating her forgiveness, announced her amiable intention of calling on Mrs. Hannay on her "day."

The day fell within a week of the dinner. It was agreed that Majendie was to meet his wife at the Hannays, and to take her home. There was a good mile between Prior Street and the Park; and Anne was a leisurely walker; so it happened that she was late, and that Majendie had arrived a few minutes before her. She did not notice him there all at once. Mrs. Hannay was a sociable little lady; the radius of her circle was rapidly increasing, and her "day" drew crowds. The lamps were not yet lit, and as Anne entered the room, it was dim to her after the daylight of the open air. She had counted on an inconspicuous entrance, and was astonished to find that the announcement of her name caused a curious disturbance and division in the assembly. A finer ear than Anne's might have detected an ominous sound, something like the rustling of leaves before a storm. But Anne's self-possession rendered her at times insensible to changes in the social atmosphere. In any case the slight commotion was no more than she had come prepared for in a whole roomful of ill-bred persons.

"Pussy," said a lady who stood near Mrs. Hannay. Mrs. Hannay had her back to the doorway. The lady's voice rang on a low note of warning, and she brought her mouth close to Mrs. Hannay's ear.

The hostess started, turned, and came at once towards Mrs. Majendie, rolling deftly between the persons who obstructed her perturbed and precipitate way. The perfect round of her cheeks had dropped a little; it was the face of a poor cherub in vexation and dismay.

"Dear Mrs. Majendie,"—her voice, once so triumphant, had dropped too, almost to a husky whisper,—"how very good of you."

She led her to a sofa, the seat of intimacy, set back a little from the central throne. (Majendie could be seen fairly immersed in the turmoil, struggling desperately through it, with a plate in his hand.)

Mrs. Hannay was followed by her husband, by the other lady, and by Gorst. She introduced the other lady as Mrs. Ransome, and they seated themselves, one on each side of Anne. The two men drew up in front of the sofa, and began to talk very fast, in loud tones and with an unnatural gaiety. The women, too, closed in upon her somewhat with their knees; they were both a little confused, both more than a little frightened, and the manner of both was mysteriously apologetic.

Anne, with her deep, insulating sense of superiority, had no doubt as to the secret of the situation. She felt herself suitably protected, guarded from contact, screened from view, distinguished very properly from persons to whom it was manifestly impossible, even for Mrs. Hannay, to introduce her. She was very sorry for poor Mrs. Hannay, she tried to make it less difficult for her, by ignoring the elements of confusion and fright. But poor Mrs. Hannay kept on being frightened; she refused to part with her panic and be natural. So terrified was she, that she hardly seemed to take in what Mrs. Majendie was saying.