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."