Anne went down to Majendie in the garden and sent him to his sister.  They returned to the house by the open window of his study.  A bright fire was burning in the room.  He looked at her shyly and half in doubt, drew up an arm-chair to the hearth, and left her there.

His manner brought back to her the days of their engagement when that room had been their refuge.  Not that they had often been alone together.  She could count the times on the fingers of one hand, the times when Edith was too ill to be wheeled into her room.  It had been nearly always in Edith’s room that she had seen him, surrounded by all the feminine devices, the tender trivialities that were part of the moving pathos of the scene.  She had so associated him with his sister that it had been hard for her to realise that he had any separate life of his own.  She felt that his love for her had simply grown out of his love for Edith, it was the flame, the flower of his tenderness.  It was one with his goodness, and she had been glad to have it so.  There was no jealousy in Anne.

It came over her now with a fresh shock, how very little, after all, she had known of him.  It was through Edith that she really knew him.  And yet it was impossible that Edith could have absorbed him utterly.  Anne had not counted his business; for it had not interested her, and to say that Walter was a ship-owner did not define him in the very least.  What remained over of Walter was a secret that this room, his study, must partially reveal.

She remembered how she had first come there, and had looked shyly about her for intimations of his inner nature, and how it was his pipe-rack and his boots that had first suggested that he had a life apart and dealings with the outer world.  Now she rose and went round the room, searching for its secret, and finding no new impressions, only fresh lights on the old.  If the room told her anything it told her how little Majendie had used it, how little he had been able to call anything his own.  The things in it had no comfortable look of service.  He could not have smoked there much, the curtains were too innocent.  He could not have sat in that arm-chair much, the surface was too smooth.  He could not have come there much at any time, for, though the carpet was faded, there was no well-worn passage from the threshold to the hearth.  As far as she could make out he came there for no earthly purpose but to change his boots before going upstairs to Edith.

The bookcase told the same story.  It held histories and standard works inherited from Majendie’s father; the works of Dickens, and Thackeray, and Hardy, read over and over again in the days when he had time for reading; several poets whom, by his own confession, he could not have read in any circumstances.  One Meredith, partly uncut, testified to an honest effort and a baulked accomplishment.  On a shelf apart stood the books that he had loved when he was a boy, the Annuals, the tales of travel and adventure, and one or two school prizes gorgeously bound.