Once more she set her face, and hardened her heart against him, and removed herself in the silence and isolation of her prayer.

Through the closed door there came the rich, confused murmur of the Confession.  He saw her lips curl, flower-like, with emotion, as her breath rose and fell in unison with the heaving chant.  He watched her with a certain reverence, incomprehensibly chastened, till the door opened, and she went from him, moving down the lighted aisle with her remote, renunciating air.

The door was shut in Majendie’s face, and he turned away, intending to kill, to murder the next hour at his club.

Anne was self-trained in the habit of detachment.  She had only to kneel, to close her eyes and cover her face, and her soul slid of its own accord into the place of peace.  Her very breathing and the beating of her heart were stayed.  Her mind, emptied in a moment, was in a moment filled, brimming over with the thought of God.  To her veiled vision that thought was like a sheet of blank light let down behind her drooped eyelids, and centring in a luminous whorl.  It fascinated her.  Her prayer shot straight to the heart of it, a communion too swift to trouble or divide the blessed light.

In that instant her husband, the image and the thought of him, were cast into the secular darkness.

She remembered how difficult it had once been thus to renounce him.  Her trouble, in the days of her engagement, had been that, thrust him from her as she would, the idea of his goodness—­the goodness that justified her through its own appeal—­would call up his presence, emerging radiant from the outermost abyss.  Inferior emotions then mingled indistinguishably with her holiest ardours.  Spiritually ambitious, she had had her young eye on a hard-won crown of glory, and she had found that happiness made the spiritual life almost contemptibly easy.  It was no effort in those days to realise divine mysteries, when the miracle of the Incarnation was, as it were, worked for her in her own soul; when she heard in her own heart the beating of the heart of God; when his hand touched her with a tenderness that warmed her place of peace.  She had hardly known this flamed and lyric creature for herself.  It was as if her soul, resting after long flight, had contemplated for the first time the silver and fine gold of her wings.

It was the facility of the revelation that had first caused her to suspect it.  And she had thrown ashes on the flame, and set a watch upon her soul, lest she should mistake an earthly for a heavenly content.  She could not bear to think that she was cheated, that her pulses counted in her sense of exaltation and beatitude.  She desired, purely, the utmost purity in that divine communion, so as to be sure that it was divine.

Now, having suffered, she was completely sure.  Her wound was the seal God set upon her soul.  It was easy enough now for her to achieve detachment, oblivion of Walter Majendie, to pour out her whole soul in the prayer for light:  “Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.”