Anne, between her headaches, devoted herself to her sister with a kind of passion.  Her keenest experience of passion came to her through the emotion wakened in her by the sight of Edith’s suffering.  She told herself that her love for Edith satisfied her heart completely; that she fulfilled herself in it as she never could have fulfilled herself in any other way.  Nothing could degrade or spoil the spiritual beauty of this relation.  It served as a standard by which she could better judge her relation to her husband.  “I love her more than I ever loved him,” she thought.  “I cannot help it.  If it had been possible to love him as I love her—­but I have lowered myself by loving him.  I will raise myself by loving her.”

She was never tired of being with Edith, sewing silently by her fireside, or reading aloud to her (for Edith’s hands were too tremulous now to hold a book), or sitting close up against her couch, nursing her hands in hers, as if she would have given them her own strength.

And thus her ardour spent and renewed itself, and left her colder than ever to her husband.

At times she mourned, obscurely, the destruction of the new soul that had been given her last year, on her birthday, when she had been born again to her sweet human destiny.  At times she had glimpses of the perfect thing it might have been.  There was no logical sequence in the events that had destroyed it, the return of Lady Cayley and the spectacle of her triumph.  She could not say that her husband had deteriorated in consequence.  The change was in herself, and not in him.  He was what he always had been; only she seemed to see him more completely now.  At times, when the high spiritual life died down in sleep, she slipped from her trouble, and turned, with her arms stretched towards him, where he lay.  In her dreams he came to her with the low cry she had heard in the wood at Westleydale.  And in her dreams she was tender; but her waking thoughts were sad and hard.

Majendie found it more than ever difficult to realise that she had ever shown him kindness, that her arms had opened to him and her pulses beaten with his own.  Her face and her body were changing with this change of soul.  Her health suffered.  Her eyes became dull, her skin dry; her small, reticent mouth had taken on the tragic droop; she was growing austerely thin.  She had abandoned the pleasing and worldly fashion of her dress, and arrayed herself now in straight-cut, sombre garments, very serviceable in the sick-room, but mournfully suggestive, to her husband’s fancy, of her renunciation of the will to please.

On her first appearance in this garb he enquired whether she had embraced the religious life.

“I always have embraced it,” said she in her ringing voice.

“I believe it’s about the only thing you ever wanted to embrace.”

“You need not say so,” she returned.

“Then why, oh why, do you wear those awful clothes?”