“I’m not so sure.  I’m tired out with it.  I give her up.”

“No, you don’t, dear, any more than I do.”

“But what can I do?  Is it, honestly, Edie, is it in any way my fault?”

“Well—­I think, perhaps, if you’d approached her in another spirit at the first—­she told me that what shocked her more than anything that night at Scarby, was, darling, your appalling flippancy.  You know, if you’d taken that tone when you first spoke to me about it, I think it would have killed me.  And she’s your wife, not your sister.  It’s worse for her.  Think of the shock it must have been to her.”

“Think of the shock it was to me.  She sprang the whole thing on me at four o’clock in the morning—­before I was awake.  What could I do?  Besides, she got over all that in the summer.  And now she goes back to it worse than ever, though I haven’t done anything in between.”

“It was all brought back to her in the autumn, remember.”

“Granted that, it’s inconceivable how she can keep it up.  It isn’t as if she was a hard woman.”

“No.  She’s softer than any woman I know, in some ways.  But she happens to be made so that that is the one thing she finds it hardest to forgive.  Besides, think of her health.”

“I wonder if that really accounts for it.”

“I think it may.”

“I don’t know.  It began before, and I’m afraid it’s come to stay.”

“What has come to stay?”

“The dislike she’s taken to me.”

“I don’t believe in her dislike.  Give her time.”

“Oh, the time I have given her!  A year and more.”

“What’s a year?  Wait,” said Edith.  “Wait.”

He waited; and as the months went on, Anne schooled herself, for her child’s sake, into strength and calm.  Her white, brooding face grew full and tender; but its tenderness was not for him.  He remained shut out from the sanctuary where she sat nursing her dream.

He suffered indescribably; but he told himself that Anne had merely taken one of those queer morbid aversions of which Gardner had told him.  And at the birth of their child he looked for it to pass.

The child was born in mid-October.  Majendie had sat up all night; and very early in the morning he was sent for to her room.  He came, stealing in on tiptoe, dumb, with his head bowed in terror and a certain awe.

He found Anne lying in the big bed under the crucifix.  Her face was dull and white, and her arms were stretched out by her sides in utter exhaustion.  When he bent over her she closed her eyes, but her lips moved as if she were trying to speak to him.  He felt her breath upon his face, but he could hear no words.

“What is it?” he whispered to the nurse who stood beside him.  She held in one arm the new-born child, hooded and folded in a piece of flannel.

The nurse touched him on the shoulder.  “She’s trying to tell you to look at your little daughter, sir.”