“God bless you.”

The solemn benediction atoned for any little momentary brusquerie.

Anne went away with a conscience wholly satisfied, in an exalted mood, fortified by all the ramparts of the spiritual life.

She was very gentle with Edith that evening.  She said to herself that her love must make up to Edie for the loss her conscience had been compelled to inflict.  “After all,” she said to herself, “it’s not as if she hadn’t me.”  Measuring her services with those of the disreputable Mr. Gorst, it seemed to her that she was amply making up.  She had a hatred of moral indebtedness, as of any other, and she loved to spend.  In reckoning the love she 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