“Edith—­when was it?”

“Seven years ago.”

Anne pondered.  The seven years helped to purify him.  Every day helped that threw the horror further back in time—­separated it from her.  If—­if he had not been steeped too long in it.  She wanted to know how long, but she was afraid to ask; afraid lest it should be brought nearer to her than she could bear.  Edith saw her fear.

“It lasted two years.  It was all my fault.”

“Your fault?”

“Yes, my fault.  Because of my horrid spine.  You see, it kept him from marrying.”

“Well, but—­”

“Well, but it couldn’t have happened if he had married.  How could it?  How could it have happened if you had been there?  You would have saved him.”

She paused on that note, a long, illuminating pause.  The note itself was a divine inspiration.  It rang all golden.  It thrilled to the verge of the dominant chord in Anne.  It touched her soul, the mother of brooding, mystic harmonies.

“You would have saved him.”

Anne saw herself for one moment as his guardian angel, her mission frustrated through a flaw of time.  That vision was dashed by another, herself as the ideal, the star he should have looked to before its dawn, herself dishonoured by his young haste, his passion, his failure to foresee.

“He should have waited for me.”

“Did you wait for him?”

A quick flush pulsed through the whiteness of Anne’s face.  She looked back seven years to her girlhood in the southern Deanery, her home.  She had another vision, a vision of a Minor Canon, whom she had loved with the pure worship of her youth, a love of which somehow she was now ashamed.  Ashamed, though it had then seemed to her so spiritual.  Her dead parents had desired the marriage, but neither she nor they had the power to bring it about.

Edith had never heard of the Minor Canon.  She had drawn a bow at a venture.

“My dear,” she said, “why not?  It’s only the very elect lovers who can say to each other, ‘I never loved any one but you.’”

“At any rate,” said Anne, “I never loved any one else well enough to marry him.”

For, in her fancy, the Minor Canon, being withdrawn in time, had ceased to occupy space; he had become that which he was for her girlhood, a disembodied dream.  She could not have explained why she was so ashamed of him.  What ground of comparison was there between that blameless one and Lady Cayley?

“Edith,” she said suddenly, “did you ever see her?”

“Never,” said Edith emphatically.

“You don’t know what she was like?”

“I don’t.  I never wanted to.  I dare say there are people in Scale who could tell you all about her, only I wouldn’t inquire if I were you.”

“Did it happen at Scarby?” She was determined to know the worst.

“I believe so.”

“Oh—­why did I ever go there?”