“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 Nancy.  That’s what she’s wanted all the time.  What a fool I was never to have thought of it.”

He breathed with an immense relief.  He had solved the enigma of Anne with all her “funniness.”  It was not that she had turned against him, nor against her destiny.  She had been disappointed of her destiny, that was all.  It was enough.  She must have been fretting for months, poor darling, and just when she could bear it no longer, Mrs. Gardner, he supposed, had come as the last straw.  No wonder that she had said he was unkind.

And in that hour of his enlightenment a great chastening fell upon Majendie.  He told himself that he must be as gentle with her as he knew how; gentler than he had ever yet known how.  And his heart smote him as he thought how he had hurt her, how he might hurt her again unknowingly, and how the tenderness of the tenderest male was brutality when applied to these wonderful, pitiful, incomprehensible things that women were.  He accepted the misery of the last three months as a fit punishment for his lack of understanding.