His light brought a great longing to him and a great hope.  From that moment he watched her anxiously.  He had never realised till now, after three months of misery, quite what she meant to him, how sacred and dear she was, and how much he loved her.

The depth of this feeling left him for the most part dumb before her.  His former levity forsook him, and Anne wondered at this change in him, and brooded over the possible cause of his serious and unintelligible silences.  She attributed them to some deep personal preoccupation of which she was not the object.

Meanwhile her days went on much as before, a serene and dignified procession to the outward eye.  She was thankful that she had so established her religion of the household that its services could still continue in their punctual order, after the joy of the spirit had departed from them.  The more she felt that she was losing, hour by hour, her love of the house in Prior Street, the more she clung to the observances that held her days together.  She had become a pale, sad-eyed, perfunctory priestess of the home.  Majendie protested against what he called her base superstition, her wholesale sacrifice to the gods of the hearth.  He forbade her to stay so much indoors, or to sit so long in Edith’s room.

One afternoon he came home unexpectedly and found her there, doing nothing, but watching Edith, who dozed.  He touched her gently, and told her to get up and go out for a walk.

“I’m too tired,” she whispered.

“Then go upstairs and lie down.”

She went; but, instead of lying down, she wandered through the house, restless and unsettled.  She was possessed by a terrible sense of isolation.  It came over her that this house of which she was the mistress did not in the least belong to her.  She had not been consulted or thought of in any of its arrangements.  There was no place in it that appealed to her as her own.  She went into the little grave old-fashioned drawing-room.  It had a beauty she approved of, a dignity that was in keeping with her own traditions, but to-day its aspect roused in her discontent and irritation.  The room had remained unchanged since the days when it was inhabited, first by her husband’s mother, then by his aunt, then by his sister.  He had handed it over, just as it stood, to his wife.  It was full, the whole house was full, of portraits of the Majendies; Majendies in oils; Majendies in water-colours; Majendies in crayons, in miniatures and silhouettes.  She thought of Mrs. Eliott’s room in Thurston Square, of the bookcases, the bronzes, the triptych with its saints in glory, and of how Fanny sat enthroned among these things that reflected completely her cultured individuality.  Fanny had counted.  Her rarity had been appreciated by the man who married her; her tastes had been studied, consulted, exquisitely indulged.  Anne did not want more books, nor bronzes, nor a triptych in her drawing-room.  But such things were symbols.