She sent a note to All Souls Vicarage, requesting an interview, at Canon Wharton’s house rather than her own.  She did not want Edith or the servants to know that she had been closeted with the Canon.  The answer came that night, making an appointment after early Evensong on the morrow.

After early Evensong, Anne found herself in the Canon’s library.  He did not keep her waiting, and, as he entered, he held out to her, literally, the hand of help.  For the Canon never wasted a gesture.  There was no detail of social observance to which he could not give some spiritual significance.  This was partly the secret of his power.  His face had lost the light that illuminated it in the pulpit, but his eyes gleamed with a lambent triumph.  They said, “Sooner or later.  But rather sooner than I had expected.”

Anne presented her case in a veiled form, as a situation in the abstract.  She scrupulously refrained from mentioning any names.

The Canon smiled at her precautions.  “We are working in the dark,” said he.  “I think I can help you a little bit more if you’ll allow me to come down to the concrete.  You are speaking, I fancy, of our poor friend, Mr. Gorst?”

She looked at him helplessly, startled at his penetration and her own betrayal, but appeased by the pitying adjective which brought Gorst into the regions of pardonable discussion.

“You needn’t be afraid,” he said.  “I had to be certain before I could advise you.  I can now tell you with confidence that you are doing right.  I—­know—­the—­man.”

He uttered the phrase with measured emphasis, and closed his teeth upon the last words with a snap.  It was impossible to convey a stronger effect of moral reprobation.  “But I see your difficulty,” he continued.  “I understand that he is a rather intimate friend of Miss Majendie.”

Anne noticed that he deliberately avoided all mention of her husband.

“She has known him for a very long time.”

“Ah yes.  And it is your affection, your pity for your sister that makes you hesitate.  You do not wish to be hard, and at the same time you wish to do right.  Is it not so?”

She murmured her assent. (How well he understood her!)

“Ah, my dear Mrs. Majendie, we have sometimes to be a little hard, in order that we may not be harder.  You have thought, perhaps, that you should be tender to this friendship?  Now, I am an old man, and I have had a pretty large experience of men and women, and I tell you that such friendships are unwholesome.  Unwholesome.  Both for the woman and the man.”

“If I thought that—­”

“You may think it.  Look at the man—­What has it done for him?  Has it made him any better, any stronger, any purer?  Has it made her any happier?”

“I think so.  It is all she has—­”

“How can you say that, my dear Mrs. Majendie, when she has you?”

“And her brother.”

The Canon gave her a keen glance.  He seemed to be turning a little extra light on to her secret, to see it the better by.  And under that light her mind conceived again a miserable suspicion.