That was in August.  Before the month was out they were beginning to give Edith morphia.

In September Gorst came to see her for the last time.

In October she died in her brother’s arms.

In the days that followed, it was as if her spirit, refusing to depart from them, had rested on the sister she had loved.  Spirit to spirit, she stooped, kindling in Anne her own dedicated flame.  In the white death-chamber, and through the quiet house, the presence of Anne, moving with a hushed footfall, was like the presence of a blessed spirit.  Her face was as a face long hidden upon the heart of peace.  Her very grief aspired; it had wings, lifting her towards her sister in her heavenly place.

For Anne, in the days that followed, was possessed by a great and burning charity.  Mrs. Hannay called and was taken into the white room to see Edith.  And Anne’s heart went out to Mrs. Hannay, when she spoke of the beauty and goodness of Edith; and to Lawson Hannay, when he pressed her hand without speaking; and to Gorst, when she saw him stealing on tiptoe from Edith’s room, his face swollen and inflamed with grief.  Her heart went out to all of them, because they had loved Edith.

And to her husband her heart went out with a tenderness born of an immense pity and compassion.  For the first three days, Majendie gave no sign that he was shaken by his sister’s death.  But on the evening of the day they buried her, Anne found him in the study, sitting in his low chair by the fire, his head sunk, his body bowed forward over his knees, convulsed with a nervous shivering.  He started and stared at her approach, and straightened himself suddenly.  She held out her hand.  He looked at it dumbly, as if unwilling or afraid to take it.

“My dear,” she said softly.

Then she knelt beside him, and drew his head down upon her breast, and let it rest there.

CHAPTER XXVII

It was a Thursday night in October, three weeks after Edith’s death.  Anne was in her room, undressing.  She moved noiselessly, with many tender precautions, for fear of waking Peggy, and for fear of destroying the peace that possessed her own soul like heavenly sleep.  It was the mystic mood that went before prayer.

In those three weeks Anne felt that she had been brought very near to God.  She had not known such stillness and content since the days at Scarby that had made her life terrible.  It was as if Edith’s spirit in bliss had power given it to help her sister, to draw Anne with it into the divine presence.