He sat looking at the quick white fingers untwisting the braid of hair.  It hung divided into three strands, still rippling with the braiding, still dull with its folded warmth.  She combed the three into one sleek sheet that covered her like a veil, drawn close over head and shoulders.  Her face showed smooth and saint-like between the cloistral bands.  Majendie thought he had never seen anything more beautiful than that face and hair, with their harmonies of dull gold and sombre white.

“I like you,” he said; “but isn’t the style just a trifle severe?”

Anne said nothing.  She was trying to forget his presence while she yet permitted it.

“Do you mind my looking at you like this?”

“No.”

(They spoke in low voices, for fear of waking the sleeping child.)

She took up her brush, and with a turn of her head swept her hair forward over one shoulder.  It hung in one mass to her waist.  Then she began to brush it.

The first strokes of the brush stirred the dull gold that slept in its ashen furrows.  A shining undulation passed through it, and broke, at the ends, as it were, into a curling golden foam.  Then Anne stood up and tossed it backwards.  Her brush went deep and straight, like a ploughshare, turning up the rich, smooth swell of the under-gold; it went light on the top, till numberless little threads of hair rippled, and rose, and knitted themselves, and lay on her head like a fine gold net; then, with a few swift swimming movements, upwards and outwards.  It scattered the whole mass into drifting strands and flying wings and soft falling feathers, and, under them, little tender curls of flaxen down.  With another stroke of the brush and a shake of her head, Anne’s hair rose in one whorl and fell again, and broke into a shower of woven spray; pure gold in every thread.

Majendie held out a shy hand and caught the receding curl of it.  Its faint fragrance reached him, winging a shaft of memory.  His nerves shook him, and he looked away.

Anne had been cool and business-like in every motion, unconscious of her effect, unconscious almost of him.  Now she gathered her hair into one mass, and began plaiting it rapidly, desiring thus to hasten his departure.  She flung back the stiff braid, and laid her finger on the extinguisher of the shaded lamp, as a hint for him to go.

“Anne,” he whispered, “Anne—­”

The whisper struck fear into her.

She faced him calmly, coldly; not unkindly.  Unkindness would have given him more hope than that pitiless imperturbability.

“Have you anything to say to me?” she said.

“No.”

“Well, then, will you be good enough to go?”

“Do you really mean it?”

“I always mean what I say.  I haven’t said my prayers yet.”

“And when you have said them?”

She had turned out the lamp, so that she might not see his unhappy face.  She did not see it; she only saw her spiritual vision destroyed and scattered, and the havoc of dreams, resurgent, profaning heavenly sleep.