And the dead woman bound the living to each other also, as she had said.  How she bound them Anne had not realised until to-day.  It was Mrs. Elliott’s day, her Thursday.  Anne had spent half an hour in Thurston Square, and had come away with a cold, unsatisfactory feeling towards Fanny.  Fanny, for the first time, had jarred on her.  She had so plainly hesitated between condolence and congratulation.  She seemed to be secretly rejoicing in Edith Majendie’s death.  Her manner intimated clearly that a burden had been removed from her friend’s life, and that the time had now come for Anne to blossom out and enjoy herself.  Anne had been glad to get away from Fanny, to come back to the house in Prior Street and to find Walter waiting for her.  Fanny, in spite of her intellectual rarity, lacked the sense that, after all, he had, the sense of Edith’s spiritual perfection.  Strangely, inconsistently, incomprehensibly, he had it.  He and his wife had that in common, if they had nothing else.  They were bound to each other by Edith’s dear and sacred memory, an immaterial, immortal tie.  They would always share their knowledge of her.  Other people might take for granted that her terrible illness had loosened, little by little, the bond that held them to her.  They knew that it was not so.  They never found themselves declining on the mourner’s pitiful commonplaces, “Poor Edie”; “She is released”; “It’s a mercy she was taken.”  It was their tribute to Edith’s triumphant personality that they mourned for her as for one cut off in the fulness of a strong, beneficent life.

For those three weeks Anne remained to her husband all that she had been on the night of Edith’s burial.

And, as she felt that nobody but her husband understood what she had lost in Edith, she realised for the first time his kindred to his sister.  She forced herself to dwell on his many admirable qualities.  He was unselfish, chivalrous, the soul of honour.  On his chivalry, which touched her more nearly than his other virtues, she was disposed to put a very high interpretation.  She felt that, in his way, he acknowledged her spiritual perfection, also, and reverenced it.  If their relations only continued as they were, she believed that she would yet be happy with him.  To think of him as she had once been obliged to think was to profane the sorrow that sanctified him now.  She was persuaded that the shock of Edith’s death had changed him, that he was ennobled by his grief.  She could not yet see that the change was in herself.  She said to herself that her prayers for him were answered.

For it was no longer an effort, painful and perfunctory, to pray for her husband.  Since Edith’s death she had prayed for him, as she had prayed in the time of reconciliation that followed her first discovery of his sin.  She was horrified when she realised how in six years her passion of redemption had grown cold.  It was there that she had failed him, in letting go the immaterial hold by which she