had spent so lavishly on Edie, she had not allowed for the amount of forgiveness that Edie had spent on her. Forgiveness is a gift we have to take, whether we will or no, and Anne was blissfully unaware of what she took.

Majendie watched her ministrations curiously. Her tenderness was the subtlest lure to the love in him that still watched and waited for its hour. That night, in the study, he was silent, nervous, and unhappy. She shrank from the unrest and misery in his eyes. They followed or were fixed on her, rousing in her an obscure resentment and discomfort. She was beginning to be afraid of him. It had come to that.

She left him earlier than usual, and went very miserably to bed. She prayed, to-night, with her eyes fixed on the crucifix. It had become for her the symbol of her life, and of her marriage, which was nothing to her now but a sacrifice, a martyrdom, a vicarious expiation of her husband's sin.

As she lay down, the beating of her pulses told her that she was not to sleep. She longed for sleep, and tried to win it to her by repeating the Psalm which had been her comfort in all times of her depression. "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth."

She closed her eyes under the peace of the beloved words. And as she closed them she felt herself once more in the arms of the green hills, the folding hills of Westleydale.

She shook off the obsession and prayed another prayer. She longed to be alone; but, to her grief, she heard the opening and shutting of a door and her husband's feet moving in the room beyond.

A few blessed moments of solitude were left her during Majendie's undressing. She devoted them to the final expulsion of all lingering illusions. She had long ago lost the illusion of her husband's immaculate goodness; and now she cast off, once for all, the dear and pitiful belief that had revived in her under her brief enchantment in the wood at Westleydale. She told herself that she had married a man who had, not only a lower standard than her own, but an entirely different code of morals, a man irremediably contaminated, destitute of all perception of spiritual values. And she had got to make the best of him, that was all. Not quite all; for she had still to make the best of herself; and the two things seemed, at moments, incompatible. To guard herself from all contact with the invading evil; to take her stand bravely, to raise the spiritual ramparts and retire behind them, that was no more than her bare duty to herself and him. She must create a standard for him by keeping herself for ever high and pure. He loved her still, in his fashion; he must also respect her, and, in respecting her, respect goodness-the highest goodnessin her.

Accustomed to move in a region of spiritual certainty, Anne was untroubled by any misgivings as to the soundness of her attitude. It was open to no criticism except the despicable wisdom of the world.

Her chief difficulty was poor Majendie's imperishable affection. She tried to protect herself from it to-night by feigning drowsiness. She lay still as a stone, stiff with her fear. Once, at midnight, she felt him stir, and turn, and raise himself on his elbow. She was conscious through all her unhappy being of the adoring tenderness with which he watched her sleep.

At last she slept, and sleeping, she dreamed a strange dream. She found herself again in Westleydale, walking in green aisles of the holy, mystic, cathedral woods. The tall beech-stems were the pillars of the temple. A still light came through them, guiding her to the beech-tree that she knew. And she saw an angel lying under the beech-tree. It lay on its side, with its wings stretched out so that the right wing covered the left. As she approached, it raised the covering wing, and in the warm hollow of the other she saw that it cradled a little naked child. And at the sight there came a thorn in her breast that pricked her. The child stirred in its sleep, and crawled to the place of the angel's breast, and it fondled it with searching lips and hands. Then it wailed, and as she heard its cry the thorn pressed sharper into Anne's breast; and the angel's eyes turned to her with an immortal anguish, and pity, and despair. She looked, and saw that its breast was as the breast of the little child. And she was moved to compassion at the helplessness of them both, of the heavenly and of the earthly thing; and she stooped and lifted the child, and laid it to her own breast, and nourished it; and had peace from her pain.

IT

CHAPTER XVIII

T was the first day in Lent. Anne had come down in a state of depression. She was silent during breakfast, and Majendie became absorbed in his morning paper. So much wisdom he had learnt. Presently he gave a sudden murmur of interest, and looked up with a smile. "I see," said he, "your friend Mrs. Gardner has got a little son."

"Has she?" said Anne coldly.

The blood flushed in her cheeks, and a sudden pang went through her and rose to her breasts with a pricking pain, such pain as she had felt once in her dream, and only once in her waking life before. She thought of dear little Mrs. Gardner, and tried to look glad. She failed miserably, achieving an expression of more than usual austerity. It was the expression that Majendie had come to associate with Lent. He thought he saw in it the spiritual woman's abhorrence of her natural destiny. And with the provocation of it the devil entered into him. "Is there anything in poor Mrs. Gardner's conduct to displease you?"

She looked at him in a dull passion of reproach. "Oh," she said, "how can you be so unkind to me!" Her breast heaved, her lower lip trembled. She rose suddenly, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth, and left the room. He heard the study door open hastily and shut again. And he said to himself, as if with a sudden lucid freshness, "What an extraordinary woman my wife is. If I only knew what I'd done."

As she had left her breakfast unfinished, he waited a judicious interval and then went to fetch her back.

He found her standing by the window, holding her hands tight to her heaving sides, trying by main force to control the tempest of her sobs. He approached her gently.

"Go away," she whispered, through loose lips that shook with every word. "Go away. Don't come near me."

"Nancy-what is it?"

She turned from him, and leaned up against the folded window shutter. Her emotion was the more terrible to him because she was so seldom given to these outbursts. She had seemed to him a woman passionless, and of almost superhuman self-possession. He removed himself to the hearth-rug and waited for five minutes.

"Poor child," he said at last. "Can't you tell me what it is?"

No answer.

He waited another five minutes, thinking hard.

"Was it was it what I said about Mrs. Gardner?"

He still waited. Then he conceived a happy idea. He would try to make her laugh.

"Just because I said she'd had a little son?"

Her tears fell to answer him.

She gathered herself together with a supreme effort, and steadied her lips to speak. "Please leave me. I came here to be alone."

A light broke in on him, and he left her.

He shut himself up in the dining-room with his light. He had pushed his breakfast aside, too preoccupied to eat it.

"So that's it?" he said to himself. "That's it. Poor