As the weeks wore on, and her hands had less to do for him, she felt that his awakened spirit guarded itself from her, fenced itself more and more with that inviolable constraint.  And she bowed her head to the punishment.

When he was well enough to be moved she took him to the south coast.  There he recovered power rapidly.  By the end of February he showed no trace of his terrible illness.

They were to return to Scale in the beginning of March.

Then, at their home-coming, she would know whether he remembered.  There would be things that they would have to say to each other.

Sometimes she thought that she could never say them; that her life was secure only within some pure, charmed circle of inviolate silence; that her wisdom lay in simply trusting him to understand her.  She could trust him.  After all, she had been most marvellously “let off”; she had not had to pay the extreme penalty; she had been allowed, oh, divinely allowed, to prove her love for him.  He could not doubt it now; it possessed her, body and soul; it was manifest to him in her eyes, and in her voice, and in the service of her hands.

And if he said nothing, surely it would mean that he, too, trusted her to understand.

CHAPTER XL

They had come back.  They had spent their first evening together in the house in Prior Street.  Anne had dreaded the return; for the house remembered its sad secrets.  She had dreaded it more on her husband’s account than on her own.

She had passed before him through the doorway of the study; and her heart had ached as she thought that it was in that room that she had struck at him and put him from her.  As he entered, she had turned, and closed the door behind them, and lifted her face to his and kissed him.  He had looked at her with his kind, sad smile, but he had said nothing.  All that evening they had sat by their hearth, silent as watchers by the dead.

From time to time she had been aware of his eyes resting on her in their profound and tragic scrutiny.  She had been reminded then of the things that yet remained unsaid.

At night he had risen at her signal; and she had waited while he put the light out; and he had followed her upstairs.  At her door she had stopped, and kissed him, and said good-night, and she had turned her head to look after him as he went.  Surely, she had thought, he will come back and speak to me.

And now she was still waiting after her undressing.  She said to herself, “We have come home.  But he will not come to me.  He has nothing to say to me.  There is nothing that can be said.  If I could only speak to him.”

She longed to go to him, to kneel at his feet and beg him to forgive her and take her back again, as if it had been she who had sinned.  But she could not.

She stood for a moment before the couch at the foot of the bed, ready to slip off her long white dressing-gown.  She paused.  Her eyes rested on the silver crucifix, the beloved symbol of redemption.  She remembered how he had given it to her.  She had not understood him even then; but she understood him now.  She longed to tell him that she understood.  But she could not.