He went with noiseless footsteps up his own stairs, past the dark doors below, past Edith’s open door where the lamp still burned brightly beyond the threshold.  At Anne’s door he paused.

It stood ajar in a dim light.  He pushed it softly open and went in.

Anne and her child lay asleep under the silver crucifix.

Peggy had been taken into Anne’s bed, and had curled herself close up against her mother’s side.  Her arm lay on Anne’s breast; one hand clutched the border of Anne’s nightgown.  The long thick braid of Anne’s hair was flung back on the pillow, framing the child’s golden head in gold.

His eyes filled with tears as he looked at them.  For a moment his heart stood still.  Why not he as well as anybody else?  His heart told him why.

As he turned he sighed.  A sigh of longing and tenderness, and of thankfulness for a great deliverance.  Above all, of thankfulness.

CHAPTER XXVI

The light burned in Edith’s room till morning; for her spine kept sleep from her through many nights.  They no longer said, “She is better, or certainly no worse.”  They said, “She is worse, or certainly no better.”  The progress of her death could be reckoned by weeks and measured by inches.  Soon they would be giving her morphia, to make her sleep.  Meanwhile she was terribly awake.

She heard her brother’s soft footsteps as he passed her door.  She heard him pause on the upper landing and creep into the room overhead.  She heard him go out again and shut himself up in the little room beyond.  There came upon her an awful intuition of the truth.

The next day she sent for him.

“What is it, Edie?” he said.

She looked at him with loving eyes, and asked him as Maggie had asked, “Are you ill?”

He started.  The question brought back to him vividly the scene of the night before; brought back to him Maggie with her love and fear.

“What is it?  Tell me,” she insisted.

He owned to headaches.  She knew he often had them.

“It’s not a bit of use,” she said, “trying to deceive me.  It’s not headaches.  It’s Anne.”

“Poor Anne.  I think she’s all right.  After all, she’s got the child, you know.”

“Yes. She’s got Peggy.  If I could see you all right, too, I should die happy.”

“Don’t worry about me.  I’m not worth it.”

She gazed at him searchingly, confirmed in her intuition.  That was the sort of thing poor Charlie used to say.

“It’s my fault,” she said.  “It always has been.”

“Angel, if you could lay everybody’s sins on your own shoulders, you would.”

“I mean it.  You were right and I was wrong.  Ah, how one pays!  Only you’ve had to pay for my untruthfulness.  I can see it now.  If I’d done as you asked me, in the beginning, and told her the truth—­”