“Oh, my dear!  What is it?”

“It’s her heart.  I thought it was her spine, because of Edie.  But it isn’t.  She has valvular disease.  Oh, Fanny, I didn’t think a little child could have it.”

“Nor I,” said Mrs. Eliott, shocked into a great calm.  “But surely—­if you take care—­”

“No.  He gives no hope.  He only says a few years, if we leave Scale and take her into the country.  She must never be overtired, never excited.  We must never vex her.  He says one violent crying fit might kill her.  And she cries so easily.  She cries sometimes till she’s sick.”

Mrs. Eliott’s face had grown white; she trembled, and was dumb before the anguish of Anne’s face.

But it was Anne who rose, and put her arms about the childless woman, and kissed and comforted her.

It was as if she had said:  Thank God you never had one.

CHAPTER XXXI

The rumour which was going the round of the clubs in due time reached Lady Cayley through the Ransomes.  It roused in her many violent and conflicting emotions.

She sat trembling in the Ransomes’ drawing-room.  Mrs. Ransome had just asked whether there was anything in it; because if there was, she, Mrs. Ransome, washed her hands of her.  She intimated that it would take a good deal of washing to get Sarah off her hands.

Sarah had unveiled the face of horror, the face of outraged virtue, and the wrath and writhing of propriety wounded in the uncertain, quivering, vital spot.  During the unveiling Dick Ransome had come in.  He wanted to know if Topsy had been bullying poor Toodles.  Whereupon Topsy wept feebly, and poor Toodles had a moment of monstrous calm.

She wanted to get it quite clear, to make no mistake.  They might as well give her the details.  Majendie had left his wife, had he?  Well, she wasn’t surprised at that.  The wonder was that, having married her, he had stuck to her so long.  He had left his wife, and was living at Scarby, was he, with her?  Well, she only wanted to get all the details clear.

At this Sarah fell into a fit of laughter very terrifying to see.  Since her own sister wouldn’t take her word for it, she supposed she’d have to prove that it was not so.

And, under the horror of her virtue and respectability, there heaved a dull, dumb fury, born of her memory that it once was, her belief that it might have been again, and her knowledge that it was not so.  She trembled, shaken by the troubling of the fire that ran underground, the immense, unseen, unliberated, primeval fire.  She was no longer a creature of sophistries, hypocrisies, and wiles.  She was the large woman of the simple earth, welded by the dark, unspiritual flame.