It was the evening of the third day. There was no change in Majendie.

Dr. Gardner had been sent for. He had come and gone. He had confirmed the Scarby doctor's opinion, with a private leaning to the side of hope. Hannay, who had waited to hear his verdict, was going back to Scale early the next morning. Mrs. Majendie had been in her husband's room all day, and he had seen little of her.

He was sitting alone by the fire after dinner, trying to read a paper, when she came in. Her approach was so gentle that he was unaware of it till she stood beside him. He started to his feet, mumbling an apology for his bewilderment. He pulled up an arm-chair to the fire for her, wandered uneasily about the room for a minute or two, and would have left it, had she not called him back to her.

"Don't go, Mr. Hannay. I want to speak to you."

He turned, with an air of frustrated evasion, and remained, a supremely uncomfortable presence.

"Have you time?" she asked.

"Plenty. All my time is at your disposal."

"You have been very kind—"

"My dear Mrs. Majendie—"

"I want you to be kinder still. I want you to tell me the truth."

"The truth—" Hannay tried to tighten his loose face into an expression of judicial reserve.

"Yes, the truth. There's no kindness in keeping things from me."

"My dear Mrs. Majendie, I'm keeping nothing from you, I assure you. The doctors have told me no more than they have told you."

"I know. It's not that."

"What is it that's troubling you?"

"Did you see Walter before he came here?"

"Yes."

"Did you see him on Friday night?"

"Yes."

"Was he perfectly well then?"

"Er—yes—he was well. Quite well."

Anne turned her sorrowful eyes upon him.

"No. There was something wrong. What was it?"

"If there was he didn't tell me."

"No. He wouldn't. Why did you hesitate just now?"

"Did I hesitate?"

"When I asked you if he was well."

"I thought you meant did I notice any signs of his illness coming on. I didn't. But of course, as you know, he was very much shaken by—-by your little girl's death."

"You noticed that while I was away?"

"Y-es. But I certainly noticed it more on the night you were speaking of."

"You would have said, then, that he must have received a severe shock?"

"Certainly—certainly I would."

Hannay responded quite cheerfully in his immense relief.

It was what they were all trying for, to make poor Mrs. Majendie believe that her husband's illness was to be attributed solely to the shock of the child's death.

"Do you think that shock could have had anything to do with his illness?"

"Of course I do. At least, I should say it was indirectly responsible for it."

She put her hand up to hide her face. He saw that in some way incomprehensible to him, so far from shielding her, he had struck a blow.

"Dr. Gardner told you that much," said he. He felt easier, somehow, in halving the responsibility with Gardner.

"Yes. He told me that. But he had not seen him since October. You saw him on Friday, the day I came home."

Hannay was confirmed in his suspicion that on Friday there had been a scene. He now saw that Mrs. Majendie was tortured by the remembrance of her part in it.

"Oh well," he said consolingly. "He hadn't been himself for a long time before that."

"I know. I know. That only makes it worse."

She wept slowly, silently, then stopped suddenly and held herself in a restraint that was ten times more pitiful to see. Hannay was unspeakably distressed.

"Perhaps," said he, "if you could tell me what's on your mind, I might be able to relieve you."

She shook her head.

"Come," he said kindly, "what is it, really? What do you imagine makes it worse?"

"I said something to him that I didn't mean."

"Of course you did," said Hannay, smiling cheerfully. "We all say things to each other that we don't mean. That wouldn't hurt him."

"But it did. I told him he was responsible for Peggy's death. I didn't know what I was saying. I let him think he killed her."

"He wouldn't think it."

"He did. There was nothing else he could think. If he dies I shall have killed him."

"You will have done nothing of the sort. He wouldn't think twice about what a woman said in her anger or her grief. He wouldn't believe it. He's got too much sense. You can put that idea out of your head for ever."

"I cannot put it out. I had to tell you—lest you should think—"

"Lest I should think—what?"

"That it was something else that caused his illness."

"But, my dear lady—it was something else. I haven't a doubt about it."

"I know what you mean," she said quickly. "He had been drinking—poor dear."

"How do you know that?"

"The doctor asked me. He asked me if he had been in the habit of taking too much."

Hannay heaved a deep sigh of discomfort and disappointment.

"It's no good," said she, "trying to keep things from me. And there's another thing that I must know."

"You're distressing yourself most needlessly. There is nothing more to know."

"I know that woman was here. I do not know whether he came here to meet her."

"Ah well—that I can assure you he did not."

"Still—he must have met her. She was here."

"How do you know that she was here?"

"You saw her yourself, coming out of the hotel. You were horrified, and you pulled me back so that I shouldn't see her."

"There's nothing in that, nothing whatever."

"If you'd seen your own face, Mr. Hannay, you would have said there was everything in it."

"My face, dear Mrs. Majendie, does not prove that they met. Or that there was any reason why they shouldn't meet. It only proves my fear lest Lady Cayley should stop and speak to you. A thing she wouldn't be very likely to do if they had met—as you suppose."

"There is nothing that woman wouldn't do."

"She wouldn't do that. She wouldn't do that."

"I don't know."

"No. You don't know. So you're bound to give her the benefit of the doubt. I advise you to do it. For your own peace of mind's sake. And for your husband's sake."

"It was for his sake that I asked you for the truth. Because—"

"You wanted me to clear him?"

"Yes. Or to tell me if there is anything I should forgive."

"I can assure you he didn't come here to see Sarah Cayley. As to forgiveness—you haven't got to forgive him that; and if you only understood, you'd find that there was precious little you ever had to forgive."

"If I only understood. You think I don't understand, even yet?"

"I'm sure you don't. You never did."

"I would give everything if I could understand now."

"Yes, if you could. But can you?"

"I've tried very hard. I've prayed to God to make me understand."

Poor Hannay was embarrassed at the name of God. He fell to contemplating his waistcoat buttons in profound abstraction for a while. Then he spoke.

"Look here, Mrs. Majendie. Poor Walter always said you were much too good for him. If you'll pardon my saying so, I never believed that until now. Now, upon my soul, I do believe it. And I believe that's where the trouble's been all along. There are things about a man that a woman like you cannot understand. She doesn't try to understand them. She doesn't want to. She'd die rather than know. So—well—the whole thing's wrapped up in mystery, and she thinks it's something awful and iniquitous, something incomprehensible."

"Yes. If she thinks about it at all."

"My dear lady, very often she thinks about it a great deal more than is good for her, and she thinks wrong. She's bound to, being what she is. Now, when an ordinary man marries that sort of woman there's certain to be trouble."

He paused, pondering. "My wife's a dear, good, little woman," he said presently; "she's the best little woman in the world for me; but I dare say to outsiders, she's a very ordinary little woman. Well, you know, I don't call myself a remarkably good man, even now, and I wasn't a good man at all before she married me. D'you mind my talking about myself like this?"

"No." She tried to keep herself sincere. "No. I don't think I do."

"You do, I'm afraid. I don't much like it myself. But, you see, I'm trying to help you. You said you wanted to understand, didn't you?"

"Yes. I want to understand."

"Well, then, I'm not a good man, and your husband is. And yet, I'd no more think of leaving my dear little wife for another woman than I would of committing a murder. But, if she'd been 'too good' for me, there's no knowing what I mightn't have done. D'you see?"

"I see. You're trying to tell me that it was my fault that my husband left me."

"Your fault? No. It was hardly your fault, Mrs. Majendie."

He meditated. "There's another thing. You good women are apt to run away with the idea that—that this sort of thing is so tremendously important to us. It isn't. It isn't."

"Then why behave as if it were?"

"We don't. That's your mistake. Ten to one, when a man's once married and happy, he doesn't think about it at all. Of course, if he isn't happy—but, even then, he doesn't go thinking about it all day long. The ordinary man doesn't. He's got other things to attend to—his business, his profession, his religion, anything you like. Those are the important things, the things he thinks about, the things that take up his time."

"I see. I see. The woman doesn't count."

"Of course she counts. But she counts in another way. Bless you, the woman may be his religion, his superstition. In your husband's case it certainly was so."

Her face quivered.

"Of course," he said, "what beats you is—how a man can love his wife with his whole heart and soul, and yet be unfaithful to her."

"Yes. If I could understand that, I should understand everything. Once, long ago, Walter said the same thing to me, and I couldn't understand."

"Well—well, it depends on what one calls unfaithfulness. Some men are brutes, but we're not talking about them. We're talking about Walter."

"Yes. We're talking about Walter."

"And Walter is my dearest friend, so dear that I hardly know how to talk to you about him."

"Try," she said.

"Well, I suppose I know more about him than anybody else. And I never knew a man freer from any weakness for women. He was always so awfully sorry for them, don't you know. Sarah Cayley could never have fastened herself on him if he hadn't been sorry for her. No more could that girl—Maggie Forrest."

"How did he come to know her?"

"Oh, some fellow he knew had behaved pretty badly to her, and Walter had been paying for her keep, years before there was anything between them. She got dependent on him, and he on her. We are pathetically dependent creatures, Mrs. Majendie."

"What was she like?"

"She? Oh, a soft, simple, clinging little thing. And instead of shaking her off, he let her cling. That's how it all began. Then, of course, the rest followed. I'm not excusing him, mind you. Only—" Poor Hannay became shy and unhappy. He hid his face in his hands and lifted it from them, red, as if with shame. "The fact is," he said, "I'm a clumsy fellow, Mrs. Majendie. I want to help you, but I'm afraid of hurting you."

"Nothing can hurt me now."

"Well—" He pondered again. "If you want to get down to the root of it, it's as simple as hunger and thirst."

"Hunger and thirst," she murmured.

"It's what I've been trying to tell you. When you're not thirsty you don't think about drinking. When you are thirsty, you do. When you're driven mad with thirst, you think of nothing else. And sometimes—not always—when you can't get clean water, you drink water that's—not so clean. Though you may be very particular. Walter was—morally—the most particular man I ever knew."

"I know. I know."

"Mind you, the more particular a man is, the thirstier he'll be. And supposing he can never get a drop of water at home, and every time he goes out, some kind person offers him a drink—can you blame him very much if, some day, he takes it?"

"No," she said. She said it very low, and turned her face from him.

"Look here, Mrs. Majendie," he said, "you know why I'm saying all this."

"To help me," she said humbly.

"And to help him. Neither you nor I know whether he's going to live or die. And I've told you all this so that, if he does die, you mayn't have to judge him harshly, and if he doesn't die, you may feel that he's—he's given back to you. D'you see?"

"Yes, I see," she said softly.

She saw that there were depths in this man that she had not suspected. She had despised Lawson Hannay. She had detested him. She had thought him coarse in grain, gross, unsufferably unspiritual. She had denied him any existence in the world of desirable persons. She had refused to see any good in him. She had wondered how Edith could tolerate him for an instant. Now she knew.

She remembered that Edith was a proud woman, and that she had said that her pride had had to go down in the dust before Lawson Hannay. And now she, too, was humbled before him. He had beaten down all her pride. He had been kind; but he had not spared her. He had not spared her; but the gentlest woman could not have been more kind.

She rose and looked at him with a strange reverence and admiration. "Whether he lives or dies," she said, "you will have given him back to me."

She took up her third night's watch.

The nurse rose as she entered, gave her some directions, and went to her own punctual sleep.

There was no change in the motionless body, in the drawn face, and in the sightless eyes.

Anne sat by her husband's side and kept her hand upon his arm to feel the life in it. She was consoled by contact, even while she told herself that she had no right to touch him.

She knew what she had done to him. She had ruined him as surely as if she had been a bad woman. He had loved her, and she had cast him from her, and sent him to his sin. There was no humiliation and no pain that she had spared him. Even the bad women sometimes spare. They have their pity for the men they ruin; they have their poor, disastrous love. She had been merciless where she owed most mercy.

Three people had tried to make her see it. Edith, who was a saint, and that woman, who was a sinner; and Lawson Hannay. They had all taken the same view of her. They had all told her the same thing.

She was a good woman, and her goodness had been her husband's ruin.

Of the three, Edith alone understood the true nature of the wrong she had done him. The others had only seen one side of it, the material, tangible side that weighed with them. Through her very goodness, she saw that that was the least part of it; she knew that it had been the least part of it with him.

Where she had wronged him most had been in the pitiless refusals of her soul. And even there she had wronged him less by the things she had refused to give than by the things that she had refused to take. There were sanctities and charities, unspeakable tendernesses, holy and half-spiritual things in him, that she had shut her eyes to. She had shut her eyes that she might justify herself.

Her fault was there, in that perpetual justification and salvation of herself; in her indestructible, implacable spiritual pride.

And she had shut her ears as she had shut her eyes. She had not listened to her sister's voice, nor to her husband's voice, nor to her little child's voice, nor to the voice of God in her own heart. Then, that she might be humbled, she had had to take God's message from the persons whom she had most detested and despised.

She had not loved well. And she saw now that men and women only counted by their power of loving. She had despised and detested poor little Mrs. Hannay; yet it might be that Mrs. Hannay was nearer to God than she had been, by her share of that one godlike thing.

She, through her horror of one sin, had come to look upon flesh and blood, on the dear human heart, and the sacred, mysterious human body, as things repellent to her spirituality, fine only in their sacrifice to the hungry, solitary flame. She had known nothing of their larger and diviner uses, their secret and profound subservience to the flame. She had come near to knowing through her motherhood, and yet she had not known.

And as she looked with anguish on the helpless body, shamed, and humiliated, and destroyed by her, she realised that now she knew.

Edith's words came back to her, "Love is a provision for the soul's redemption of the body. Or, may be, for the body's redemption of the soul." She understood them now. She saw that Edith had spoken to her of the miracle of miracles. She saw that the path of all spirits going upward is by acceptance of that miracle. She, who had sinned the spiritual sin, could find salvation only by that way.

It was there that she had been led, all the while, if she had but known it. But she had turned aside, and had been sent back, over and over again, to find the way. Now she had found it; and there could be no more turning back.

She saw it all. She saw a purity greater than her own, a strong and tender virtue, walking in the ways of earth and cleansing them. She saw love as a divine spirit, going down into the courses of the blood and into the chambers of the heart, moving mortal things to immortality. She saw that there is no spirituality worthy of the name that has not been proven in the house of flesh.

She had failed in spirituality. She had fixed the spiritual life away from earth, beyond the ramparts. She saw that the spiritual life is here.

And more than this, she saw that in her husband's nature hidden deep down under the perversities that bewildered and estranged her, there was a sense of these things, of the sanctity of their life. She saw what they might have made of it together; what she had actually made of it, and of herself and him. She thought of his patience, his chivalry and forbearance, and of his deep and tender love for her and for their child.

God had given him to her to love; and she had not loved him. God had given her to him for his help and his protection; and she had not helped, she had not protected him.

God had dealt justly with her. She had loved God; but God had rejected a love that was owing to her husband. Looking back, she saw that she had been nearest to God in the days when she had been nearest to her husband. The days of her separation had been the days of her separation from God. And she had not seen it.

All the love that was in her she had given to her child. Her child had been born that she might see that the love which was given to her was holy; and she had not seen it. So God had taken her child from her that she might see.

And seeing that, she saw herself aright. That passion of motherhood was not all the love that was in her. The love that was in her had sprung up, full-grown, in a single night. And it had grown to the stature of the diviner love she saw. And as she felt that great springing up of love, with all its strong endurances and charities, she saw herself redeemed by her husband's sin.

There she paused, trembling. It was a great and terrible mystery, that the sin of his body should be the saving of her soul. And as she thought of the price paid for her, she humbled herself once more in her shame.

She was no longer afraid that he would die. Something told her that he would live, that he would be given back to her. She dared not think how. He might be given back paralysed, helpless, and with a ruined mind. Her punishment might be the continual reproach of his presence, her only consolation the tending of the body she had tortured, humiliated, and destroyed. She prayed God to be merciful and spare her that.

And on the morning of the fifth day Majendie woke from his terrible sleep. He could see light. Towards evening his breathing softened and grew soundless. And on the dawn of the sixth day he called her name, "Nancy."

Then she knew that for a little time he would be given back to her. And, as she nursed him, love in her moved with a new ardour and a new surrender. For more than seven years her pulses had been proof against his passion and his strength. Now, at the touch of his helpless body, they stirred with a strange, adoring tenderness. But as yet she went humbly, in her fear of the punishment that might be measured to her. She told herself it was enough that he was aware of her, of her touch, of her voice, of her face as it bent over him. She hushed the new-born hope in her heart, lest its cry should wake the angel of the divine retribution.

Then, week by week, slowly, a little joy came to her, as she saw the gradual return of power to the paralysed body and clearness to the flooded brain. She wondered, when he would begin to remember, whether her face would recall to him their last interview, her cruelty, her repudiation.

At last she knew that he remembered. She dared not ask herself "How much?" It was borne in on her that it was this way that her punishment would come.

For, as he gradually recovered, his manner to her became more constrained; notwithstanding his helpless dependence on her. He was shy and humble; grateful for the things she did for him; grateful with a heart-rending, pitiful surprise. It was as if he had looked to come back to the heartless woman he had known, and was puzzled at finding another woman in her place.

As the weeks wore on, and her hands had less to do for him, she felt that his awakened spirit guarded itself from her, fenced itself more and more with that inviolable constraint. And she bowed her head to the punishment.

When he was well enough to be moved she took him to the south coast. There he recovered power rapidly. By the end of February he showed no trace of his terrible illness.

They were to return to Scale in the beginning of March.

Then, at their home-coming, she would know whether he remembered. There would be things that they would have to say to each other.

Sometimes she thought that she could never say them; that her life was secure only within some pure, charmed circle of inviolate silence; that her wisdom lay in simply trusting him to understand her. She could trust him. After all, she had been most marvellously "let off"; she had not had to pay the extreme penalty; she had been allowed, oh, divinely allowed, to prove her love for him. He could not doubt it now; it possessed her, body and soul; it was manifest to him in her eyes, and in her voice, and in the service of her hands.

And if he said nothing, surely it would mean that he, too, trusted her to understand.