“Aren’t you going to wear them?” he inquired anxiously.

Her upper lip lifted an instant, caught up, in its fashion, by the pretty play of the little sensitive amber mole.  Two small white teeth showed and were hidden again.  It was as if she had been about to smile, or to speak, and had thought better of it.

She took up the flowers and tried them, now at her breast, and now at her waist.

“Where shall I put them?” said she.  “Here?  Or here?”

“Just there.”

She let them stay there in the hollow of her breast.

He laid the box on the dressing-table close to her hand where it searched for pins.

“I’ve brought you this,” he said gently.

She smiled that divine and virgin smile of hers.  Anne was big, but her smile was small and close and shy.

“You remembered my birthday?”

“Did you think I should forget?”

She opened the lid with cool unhurried fingers.  Under the wrappings of tissue paper and cotton wool, a shape struck clear and firm and familiar to her touch.  A sacred thrill ran through her as she felt there the presence of the holy thing, the symbol so dear and so desired that it was divined before seen.

She lifted from the box an old silver crucifix.  It must have been the work of some craftsman whose art was pure and fine as the silver he had wrought in.  But that was not what Anne saw.  She had always found something painful and repellent in those crucifixes of wood which distort and deepen the lines of ivory, or in those of ivory which gives again the very pallor of human death.  But the precious metal had somehow eternalised the symbol of the crucified body.  She saw more than the torture, the exhaustion, the attenuation.  Surely, on the closed eyelids there rested the glory and the peace of divine accomplishment?

She stood still, holding it in her hand and looking at it.  Majendie stood still, also looking at her.  He was not quite sure whether she were going to accept that gift, whether she would hesitate to take from his profane hands a thing so sacred and so supreme.  He was aware that his fate somehow hung on her acceptance, and he waited in silence, lest a word should destroy the work of love in her.

Anne, too (when she could detach her mind from the crucifix), felt that the moment was decisive.  To accept that gift, of all gifts, was to lay her spirit under obligation to him.  It was more than a surrender of body, heart, or mind.  It was to admit him to association with the unspeakably sacred acts of prayer and adoration.

If it were possible that that had been his desire; if he had meant his gift as a tribute, not to her only, but to the spirit of holiness in her; if, in short, he had been serious, then, indeed, she could not hesitate.  For, if it were so, her prayer was answered.

She laid down the crucifix and turned to him.  They searched each other with their eyes.  She saw, without wholly understanding, the pain in his.  He saw, also unintelligently, the austerity in hers.