It was a Thursday night in October, three weeks after Edith's death. Anne was in her room, undressing. She moved noiselessly, with many tender precautions, for fear of waking Peggy, and for fear of destroying the peace that possessed her own soul like heavenly sleep. It was the mystic mood that went before prayer.

In those three weeks Anne felt that she had been brought very near to God. She had not known such stillness and content since the days at Scarby that had made her life terrible. It was as if Edith's spirit in bliss had power given it to help her sister, to draw Anne with it into the divine presence.

And the dead woman bound the living to each other also, as she had said. How she bound them Anne had not realised until to-day. It was Mrs. Elliott's day, her Thursday. Anne had spent half an hour in Thurston Square, and had come away with a cold, unsatisfactory feeling towards Fanny. Fanny, for the first time, had jarred on her. She had so plainly hesitated between condolence and congratulation. She seemed to be secretly rejoicing in Edith Majendie's death. Her manner intimated clearly that a burden had been removed from her friend's life, and that the time had now come for Anne to blossom out and enjoy herself. Anne had been glad to get away from Fanny, to come back to the house in Prior Street and to find Walter waiting for her. Fanny, in spite of her intellectual rarity, lacked the sense that, after all, he had, the sense of Edith's spiritual perfection. Strangely, inconsistently, incomprehensibly, he had it. He and his wife had that in common, if they had nothing else. They were bound to each other by Edith's dear and sacred memory, an immaterial, immortal tie. They would always share their knowledge of her. Other people might take for granted that her terrible illness had loosened, little by little, the bond that held them to her. They knew that it was not so. They never found themselves declining on the mourner's pitiful commonplaces, "Poor Edie"; "She is released"; "It's a mercy she was taken." It was their tribute to Edith's triumphant personality that they mourned for her as for one cut off in the fulness of a strong, beneficent life.

For those three weeks Anne remained to her husband all that she had been on the night of Edith's burial.

And, as she felt that nobody but her husband understood what she had lost in Edith, she realised for the first time his kindred to his sister. She forced herself to dwell on his many admirable qualities. He was unselfish, chivalrous, the soul of honour. On his chivalry, which touched her more nearly than his other virtues, she was disposed to put a very high interpretation. She felt that, in his way, he acknowledged her spiritual perfection, also, and reverenced it. If their relations only continued as they were, she believed that she would yet be happy with him. To think of him as she had once been obliged to think was to profane the sorrow that sanctified him now. She was persuaded that the shock of Edith's death had changed him, that he was ennobled by his grief. She could not yet see that the change was in herself. She said to herself that her prayers for him were answered.

For it was no longer an effort, painful and perfunctory, to pray for her husband. Since Edith's death she had prayed for him, as she had prayed in the time of reconciliation that followed her first discovery of his sin. She was horrified when she realised how in six years her passion of redemption had grown cold. It was there that she had failed him, in letting go the immaterial hold by which she might have drawn him with her into the secret shelter of the Unseen. She perceived that in those years her spiritual life had suffered by the invasion of her earthly trouble. She had approached the silent shelter with cries of supplication for herself and for her child, the sweet mortal thing she had loved above all mortal things. Every year had made it harder for her to reach the sources of her help, hardest of all to achieve the initiatory state, the nakedness, the prostration, the stillness of the dedicated soul. Too many miseries cried and strove in her. She could no longer shut to her door, and bar the passage to the procession of her thoughts, no longer cleanse and empty her spirit's house for the divine thing she desired to dwell with her.

And now she was restored to her peace; lifted up and swept, effortless, into the place of heavenly help. Anne's soul had no longer to reach out her hand and feel her way to God, for it was God who sought for her and found her. She heard behind her, as it were, the footsteps of the divine pursuing power. Once more, as in the mystic days before her marriage, she had only to close her eyes, and the communion was complete. At night, when her prayer was ended, she lay motionless in the darkness, till she seemed to pass into the ultimate bliss, beyond the reach of prayer. There were moments when she felt herself to be close upon the very vision of God, the beatitude of the pure.

After these moments Anne found herself contemplating her own inviolate sanctity.

There was in Anne an immense sincerity, underlying a perfect tangle of minute deceptions and hypocrisies. She was not deceived as to the supreme event. She was truly experiencing the great spiritual passion which, alone of passions, is destined to an immortal satisfaction. She had all but touched the end of the saint's progress. But she was ignorant, both of the paths that brought her there, and the paths that had led and might again lead, her feet astray.

Each night, when she closed her bedroom door, she felt that she was entering into a sanctuary. She was profoundly, tenderly grateful to her husband for the renunciation that made that refuge possible to her. She accepted her blessed isolation as his gift.

This Thursday had been a day of little lacerating distractions. She had gone through it thirsting for the rest and surrender, the healing silence of the night.

She undressed slowly, being by nature thorough and deliberate in all her movements.

She was standing before her looking-glass, about to unpin her hair, when she heard a low knock at her door. Majendie had been detained, and was late in coming to take his last look at Peggy before going to bed.

Anne opened the door softly, and signed to him to make no noise. He stole on tiptoe to the child's cot, and stood there for a moment. Then he came and sat down in the chair by the dressing-table, where Anne was standing with her arms raised, unpinning her hair. Majendie had always admired that attitude in Anne. It was simple, calm, classic, and superbly feminine. Her long white wrapper clothed her more perfectly than any dress.

He sat looking at the quick white fingers untwisting the braid of hair. It hung divided into three strands, still rippling with the braiding, still dull with its folded warmth. She combed the three into one sleek sheet that covered her like a veil, drawn close over head and shoulders. Her face showed smooth and saint-like between the cloistral bands. Majendie thought he had never seen anything more beautiful than that face and hair, with their harmonies of dull gold and sombre white.

"I like you," he said; "but isn't the style just a trifle severe?"

Anne said nothing. She was trying to forget his presence while she yet permitted it.

"Do you mind my looking at you like this?"

"No."

(They spoke in low voices, for fear of waking the sleeping child.)

She took up her brush, and with a turn of her head swept her hair forward over one shoulder. It hung in one mass to her waist. Then she began to brush it.

The first strokes of the brush stirred the dull gold that slept in its ashen furrows. A shining undulation passed through it, and broke, at the ends, as it were, into a curling golden foam. Then Anne stood up and tossed it backwards. Her brush went deep and straight, like a ploughshare, turning up the rich, smooth swell of the under-gold; it went light on the top, till numberless little threads of hair rippled, and rose, and knitted themselves, and lay on her head like a fine gold net; then, with a few swift swimming movements, upwards and outwards. It scattered the whole mass into drifting strands and flying wings and soft falling feathers, and, under them, little tender curls of flaxen down. With another stroke of the brush and a shake of her head, Anne's hair rose in one whorl and fell again, and broke into a shower of woven spray; pure gold in every thread.

Majendie held out a shy hand and caught the receding curl of it. Its faint fragrance reached him, winging a shaft of memory. His nerves shook him, and he looked away.

Anne had been cool and business-like in every motion, unconscious of her effect, unconscious almost of him. Now she gathered her hair into one mass, and began plaiting it rapidly, desiring thus to hasten his departure. She flung back the stiff braid, and laid her finger on the extinguisher of the shaded lamp, as a hint for him to go.

"Anne," he whispered, "Anne—"

The whisper struck fear into her.

She faced him calmly, coldly; not unkindly. Unkindness would have given him more hope than that pitiless imperturbability.

"Have you anything to say to me?" she said.

"No."

"Well, then, will you be good enough to go?"

"Do you really mean it?"

"I always mean what I say. I haven't said my prayers yet."

"And when you have said them?"

She had turned out the lamp, so that she might not see his unhappy face. She did not see it; she only saw her spiritual vision destroyed and scattered, and the havoc of dreams, resurgent, profaning heavenly sleep.

"Please," she whispered, "please, if you love me, leave me to myself."

He left her; and her heart turned after him as he went, and blessed him.

"He is good, after all," her heart said.

But Majendie's heart had hardened. He said to himself, "She is too much for me." As he lay awake thinking of her, he remembered Maggie. He remembered that Maggie loved him, and that he had gone away from her and left her, because he loved Anne. And now, because he loved Anne, he would go to Maggie. He remembered that it was on Fridays that he used to go and see her.

Very well, to-morrow night would be Friday night.

To-morrow night he would go and see her.

And yet, when to-morrow night came, he did not go. He never went until December, when Maggie's postal orders left off coming. Then he knew that Maggie was ill again. She had been fretting. He knew it; although, this time, she had not written to tell him so.

He went, and found Maggie perfectly well. The postal orders had not come, because the last lady, the lady with the title, had not paid her. Maggie was good as gold again, placid and at peace.

"Why," he asked himself bitterly, "why did I not leave her to her peace?"

And a still more bitter voice answered, "Why not you, as well as anybody else?"