“My clothes are suitable,” said she.

“Suitable?  My dear girl, they suggest a divorce-suit, Majendie versus Majendie, if you like.  You’re a walking prosecution.  Your face, with that expression on it, is a decree nisi with costs.  You don’t want to be a libel on your husband, do you?”

“How can you say such things?”

“Well—­look in the glass, dear, if you don’t believe me.”

She looked.  The dress was certainly not becoming.  She greeted the joyless apparition with her thin, unwilling smile.

He put his arm around her and drew her to him.  He loved her dearly, for all her sadness and unsweetness.

“Poor Nancy,” he said, “I am a brute.  Forgive me.”

“I do forgive you.”

The words seemed the refrain of her life’s sad song.

And as he kissed her he said to himself, “That’s all very well; but if I only knew what I’m supposed to have done to her!  Her friends must think me a perfect monster.”

And, indeed, there was more truth than Majendie was aware of in his extravagant jests.  His wife’s face was so eloquent of misery that her friends were not slow in drawing their conclusions.  Thurston Square prepared itself to rally round her.  Mrs. Eliott was loyal in keeping what she supposed to be Anne’s secret, but when she found that the Gardners also understood that young Mrs. Majendie wasn’t very happy with her husband, discussion became free in Thurston Square, though it went no further.

“The kindest thing we can do is to give her a refuge sometimes from his dreadful friends,” said Mrs. Eliott.  “I have to ask her here every time they’re there.”

Mrs. Gardner declared that she also would ask her gladly.  Miss Proctor said that she would ask Mr. Majendie and Mr. Gorst, which would come to the same thing for Anne, but that she would not have Anne without her husband.  Miss Proctor could be depended on to take a light view of any situation, a view entirely her own.

So the Gardners, as well as the Eliotts, rallied round Mrs. Majendie, and offered their house also as her refuge.  And thus poor Anne, whose ideal was an indestructible loyalty, contrived to build up the most undesirable reputation for her husband in Thurston Square.  Of this reputation she now became aware, and it reacted on her own estimate of him.  She said to herself, “They don’t approve of him.  They seem to know something.  They are sorry for me.”  And she was humbled in her pride.

The one who seemed to know most, and to be sorriest of all, was Canon Wharton.  She was always meeting him now.  It was positively as if he lay in wait for her.  His eyes seemed more than ever to have penetrated her secret.  They held it safe under the pent-house of his brows.  They seemed to be always making allusions to it, while his tongue preserved a delicate reticence.  At meeting they said to her, “It doesn’t matter if I know your secret.  Do you suppose it is so evident to everybody?  Why, in all this town, there is no one—­no one, dear lady—­capable of discovering it but I. It is a spiritual secret.”  And at parting they said, “When you can bear it no longer you must come to me.  Sooner or later you will come to me.”