And Anne did not refuse.

Thus her terror grew.  If it was to come to Peggy that way, her knowledge of the difference, what was Peggy to think when she grew older?  When she began to see?

That was how Anne grew soft.

Her very body was changing into the beauty of her motherhood.  The sweetness of her face, arrested in its hour of blossom, had unfolded and flowered again.  Her mouth had lost its sad droop, and for Peggy there came many times laughter, and many times that lifting of the upper lip, the gleam of the white teeth, and the play of the little amber mole that Majendie loved and Anne was ashamed of.

She had become for her child that which she had been for her husband in her strange, immortal moments of surrender, a woman warmed and transfigured by a secret fire.  Her new beauty remained, like a brooding charm, when the child was not with her.

And as the seasons, passing, made her more and more a woman dear and desirable, Majendie’s passion for her became almost insane through its frustration.

Anne was aware of the insanity without realising its cause.  He avoided her touch, and she wondered why.  Her voice, heard in another room, drew his heart after her in longing.  At the worst moments, to get away from her, he went out of the house.  And she wondered where.  Hours of stupefying depression were followed by fits of irritability that frightened her.  And then she wished that he would not go to the Hannays, and eat things that disagreed with him.

Little Peggy helped to make his misery more unendurable.  She was always running to and fro between her father and her mother, with questions concerning kisses and other endearments, till he, too, wondered what she would make of it when she began to see.  Everything conspired against him.  Peggy’s formidable innocence was re-enforced by the still more formidable innocence of her mother.  Anne positively flaunted before him the spectacle of her maternal passion.  She showered her tendernesses on the child, without measuring their effect on him, for whom she had none.  She did not allow herself to wonder how he felt, when he sat there hungry, looking on, while the little creature, greedy for caresses, was given her fill of love.

And when he was tortured by headache, she brought him an effervescing drink, and considered that she had done her duty.

A worse headache than usual had smitten him one late Sunday afternoon in August.  A Sunday afternoon that made (but for Majendie and his headache) a little sacred idyl, so golden was it, so holy and so happy, with Peggy trotting between her father’s and mother’s knees, and the prodigal, burning with penitence, upstairs in Edie’s room, singing Lead, Kindly Light, in a heavenly tenor.

Peggy tugged at Majendie’s coat.

“Sing, daddy, sing!  Mummy, make daddy sing.”

“I can’t make him sing, darling,” said Anne, who was making soft eyes at Peggy, and curling her mouth into the shape it took when it sent kisses to her across the room.