Majendie landed at the pier and went straight to the office. There he found a telegram from Anne telling him of his child's death.

He went to the house. The old nurse opened the door for him. She was weeping bitterly. He asked for Anne, and was told that she was lying down and could not see him. It was Nanna who told him how Peggy died, and all the things he had to know. When she left him, he shut himself up alone in his study for the first hour of his grief. He wanted to go to Anne; but he was too deeply stupefied to wonder why she would not see him.

Later they met.

He knew by his first glance at her face that he must not speak to her of the dead child. He could understand that. He was even glad of it. In this she was like him, that deep feeling left her dumb. And yet, there was a difference. It was that he could not speak, and she, he felt, would not.

There were things that had to be done. He did them all, sparing her as much as possible. Once or twice she had to be consulted. She gave him a fact, or an opinion, in a brief methodic manner that set him at a distance from her sacred sorrow. She had betrayed more emotion in speaking to Dr. Gardner.

But for these things they went through their first day in silence, like people who respect each other's grief too profoundly for any speech.

In the evening they sat together in the drawing-room. There was nothing more to do.

Then he spoke. He asked to see Peggy. His voice was so low that she did not hear him.

"What did you say, Walter?"

He had to say it again. "Where is she? Can I see her?"

His voice was still low, and it was thick and uncertain, but this time she understood.

"In Edie's room," she said. "Nanna has the key."

She did not go with him.

When he came back to her she was still cold and torpid. He could understand that her grief had frozen her.

At night she parted from him without a word.

So the days went on.

Sometimes he would sit in the study by himself for a little while. His racked nerves were soothed by solitude. Then he would think of the woman upstairs in the drawing-room, sitting alone. And he would go to her. She did not send him away. She did not leave him. She did nothing. She said nothing.

He began to be afraid. It would do her good, he said to himself, if she could cry. He wondered whether it was wise to leave her to her terrible torpor; whether he ought to speak to her. But he could not.

Yet she was kind to him for all her coldness. Once, when his grief was heaviest upon him, he thought she looked at him with anxiety, with pity. She came to him once, where he sat downstairs, alone. But though she came to him, she still kept him from her. And she would not go with him into the room where Peggy lay.

Now and then he wondered if she knew. He was not certain. He put the thought away from him. He was sure that for nearly three years she had not known anything. She had not known anything as long as she had had the child, when her knowing would not, he thought, have mattered half so much. It would be horrible if she knew now. And yet sometimes her eyes seemed to say to him: "Why not now? When nothing matters."

On the night before the funeral, the night they closed the coffin, he came to her where she sat upstairs alone. He put his hand on her shoulder and spoke her name. She shrank from him with a low cry. And again he wondered if she knew.

The day after the funeral she told him that she was going away for a month with Mrs. Gardner.

He said he was glad to hear it. It would do her good. It was the best thing she could do.

He had meant to take her away himself. She knew it. Yet she had arranged to go with Mrs. Gardner.

Then he was certain that she knew.

She went, with Mrs. Gardner, the next day. He and Dr. Gardner saw them off at the station. He thanked Mrs. Gardner for her kindness, wondering if she knew. The little woman had tears in her eyes. She pressed his hand and tried to speak to him, and broke down. He gathered that, whatever Anne knew, her friend knew nothing.

The doctor was inscrutable. He might or he might not know. If he did, he would keep his knowledge to himself. They walked together from the station, and the doctor talked about the weather and the municipal elections.

Anne was to be away a month. Majendie wrote to her every week and received, every week, a precise, formal little letter in reply. She told him, every week, of an improvement in her own health, and appeared solicitous for his.

While she was away, he saw a great deal of the Hannays and of Gorst. When he was not with the Hannays, Gorst was with him. Gorst was punctilious, but a little shy in his inquiries for Mrs. Majendie. The Hannays made no allusion to her beyond what decency demanded. They evidently regarded her as a painful subject.

About a week before the day fixed for Anne's return, the firm of Hannay & Majendie had occasion to consult its solicitor about a mortgage on some office buildings. Price was excited and assiduous. Excited and assiduous, Hannay thought, beyond all proportion to the trivial affair. Hannay noticed that Price took a peculiar and almost morbid interest in the junior partner. His manner set Hannay thinking. It suggested the legal instinct scenting the divorce-court from afar.

He spoke of it to Mrs. Hannay.

"Do you think she knows?" said Mrs. Hannay.

"Of course she does. Or why should she leave him, at a time when most people stick to each other if they've never stuck before?"

"Do you think she'll try for a separation?"

"No, I don't."

"I do," said Mrs. Hannay. "Now that the dear little girl's gone."

"Not she. She won't let him off as easily as all that. She'll think of the other woman. And she'll live with him and punish him for ever."

He paused pondering. Then he delivered himself of that which was within him, his idea of Anne.

"I always said she was a she-dog in the manger."