But there was something in her love for Majendie that revealed it as a thing apart.  It had not made her idle.  Her passion for Mr. Majendie blossomed and flowered, and ran over in beautiful embroidery.  That industry ministered to it.  Her heart was set on having those little sums to send him every week; for that was the only way she could hope to approach him of her own movement.  She loved the curt little notes in which Majendie acknowledged the receipt of each postal order.  She tied them together with white ribbon, and treasured them in a little box under lock and key.  All the time, she knew he had a wife and child, but her fancy refused to recognise Mrs. Majendie’s existence.  It allowed him to have a child, but not a wife.  She knew that he spent his Saturdays and Sundays with them at his home.  He never came, or could come, on a Saturday or Sunday, and Maggie refused to consider the significance of this.  She simply lived from Friday to Friday.  No other day in the week existed for Maggie.  All other days heralded it, or followed in its train.  The blessed memory of it rested upon Saturday and Sunday.  Wednesday and Thursday glowed and vibrated with its coming; Mondays and Tuesdays were forlorn and grey.  Terrible were the days which followed a Friday when he had not come.

He had not come last Friday, nor the Friday before that.  She had always a comfortable little theory to cheat herself with, to account for his not coming.  He had been ill last Friday; that, of course, was why he had not come, Maggie knew.  She did not like to think he was ill; but she did like to think that only illness could prevent his coming.  And she had always believed what she liked.

The presumption in Maggie’s mind amounted to a certainty that he would come to-night.

And at nine o’clock he came.

Her eyes shone as she greeted him.  There was nothing about her to remind him of the dejected, anaemic girl who had sat shivering over the fire last September.  Maggie had got all her lights and colours back again.  She was lifted from her abasement, glorified.  And yet, for all her glory, Maggie, on her good behaviour, became once more the prim young lady of the lower middle class.  She sat, as she had been used to sit on long, dull Sunday afternoons in the parlour above the village shop, bolt upright on her chair, with her meek hands folded in her lap.  But her eyes were fixed on Majendie, their ardent candour contrasting oddly with the stiff modesty of her deportment.

“Have you been ill?” she asked.

“Why should I have been ill?”

“Because you didn’t come.”

“You mustn’t suppose I’m ill every time I don’t come.  I might be a chronic invalid at that rate.”

He hadn’t realised how often he came. He didn’t mark the days with crosses in a calendar.

“But you were ill, this time, I know.”

“How do you know?”

The processes of Maggie’s mind amused him.  It was such a funny, fugitive, burrowing, darting thing, Maggie’s mind, transparent and yet secret in its ways.