Her hands, as she prayed, were folded close over her eyes.  Having annihilated her husband, she was disagreeably astonished to find that he was there, that he had been there for some time, in the seat beside her.

He was sitting in what he took to be an attitude of extreme reverence, his head bowed and resting on his left arm, which was supported by the back of the seat in front of him.  His right arm embraced, unconsciously, Anne’s muff.  Anne was vividly, painfully aware of him.  Over the crook of his elbow one eye looked up at her, bright, smiling with inextinguishable affection.  His lips gave out a sound that was not a prayer, but something between a murmur and a moan, distinctly audible.  She felt his gaze as a gross, tangible thing, as a violent hand, parting the veils of prayer.  She bowed her head lower and pressed her hands to her face till the blood tingled.

The sermon obliged her to sit upright and exposed.  It gave him iniquitous opportunity.  He turned in his seat; his eyes watched her under half-closed lids, two slits shining through the thick, dark curtain of their lashes.  He kept on pulling at his moustache, as if to hide the dumb but expressive adoration of his mouth.  Anne, who felt that her soul had been overtaken, trapped, and bared to the outrage, removed herself by a yard’s length till the hymn brought them together, linked by the book she could not withhold.  The music penetrated her soul and healed its hurt.

  “Christian, doth thou see them,
     On the holy ground,
   How the troops of Midian
     Prowl and prowl around?”

sang Anne in a dulcet pianissimo, obedient to the choir.

Profound abstraction veiled him, a treacherous unspiritual calm.  Majendie was a man with a baritone voice, which at times possessed him like a furious devil.  It was sleeping in him now, biding its time, ready, she knew, to be roused by the first touch of a crescendo.  The crescendo came.

  “Christian!  Up and fight them!”

The voice waked; it leaped from him; and to Anne’s terrified nerves it seemed to be scattering the voices of the choir before it.  It dropped on the Amen and died; but in dying it remained triumphant, like the trump of an archangel retreating to the uttermost ends of heaven.

Anne’s heart pained her with a profane tenderness, and a poignant repudiation.  Her soul being once more adjusted to the divine, it was intolerable to think that this preposterous human voice should have power to shake it so.

She sank to her knees and bowed her head to the Benediction.

“Did you like it?” he asked as they emerged together into the open air.

He spoke as if to the child she seemed to him now to be.  They had been playing together, pretending they were two pilgrims bound for the Heavenly City, and he wanted to know if she had had a nice game.  He nursed the exquisite illusion that this time he had pleased her by playing too.