The ramparts of the spiritual life were shaken.  Her prayers, that were once an ascension of flamed and winged powers carrying her to heaven, had become mere clamorous petitions, drawing down the things of heaven to earth.  Night and morning the same passionate prayer for herself and her child, the same prayer for her husband, painful and perfunctory; but not always now the same sense of absolution, of supreme and intimate communion.  It was as if a veil, opaque but intangible, were drawn between her spirit and the Unseen.  She thought it had come of living in perpetual contact with Walter’s deterioration.

Yet Anne was softer.

Her love for Peggy had become more and more an engrossing passion, as Majendie left her more and more to the dominion of her motherhood.  He had seen enough of the effect of rivalry.  It was Anne’s pleasure to take Peggy from her nurse and wash her and dress her, to tend her fine limbs, and comb her pale soft hair.  It was as if her care for the little tender body had taught her patience and gentleness towards flesh and blood; as if, through the love it invoked, some veil was torn for her, and she saw, wrought in the body of her child, the wonder of the spirit’s fellowship with earth.

She dreaded the passing of the seasons, as they would take with them each some heart-rending charm of Peggy’s infancy.  Now it would be the ceasing of her pretty, helpless cry, as Peggy acquired mastery over things; now the repudiation of her delicious play, as Peggy’s intellect perceived its puerility; and now the leaving off for ever of the speech that was Peggy’s own, as Peggy adopted the superstition of the English language.  A few years and Peggy would have cast off pinafores, a very few more, and Peggy would be at a boarding-school; and before she left it she would have her hair up.  There was a pang for Peggy’s mother in looking backward, and in looking forward pang upon intolerable pang.

But Peggy was in no hurry to grow up.  Her delicacy prolonged her babyhood and its sweet impunity.  The sad state of Peggy’s little body accounted for all the little sins that weighed on Peggy’s mother’s soul.  You couldn’t punish Peggy.  An untender look made her tremble; at a harsh word she cried till she was sick.  When Peggy committed sin she ran and told her mother, as if it were some wonderful and interesting experience.  Anne was afraid that she would never teach the child the difference between right and wrong.

In this, by some strange irony, Majendie, for all his self-effacement, proved more effectual than Anne.

They were all three in the drawing-room one Sunday afternoon at tea-time.  It was Peggy’s hour.  And in that hour she had found her moment, when her parents’ backs were turned to the tea-table.  The moment over, she came to Majendie, shivering with delight.

“Oh, daddy, daddy,” she cried, “I did ’teal some sugar.  I did ’teal it my own self, and eated it all up.”