“Are you not going to take it, then?” he said.

“I don’t know.  Do you realise that you are giving me a very sacred thing?”

“I do.”

“And that I can’t treat it as I would an ordinary present?”

He lowered his eyelids.  “I didn’t think you’d want to wear it in your hair, dear.”

She was about to ask him what he did mean then; but some instinct held her, told her not to press the sign of grace too hard.  She looked at him still more intently.  His eyes had disconcerted and baffled her, but now she was sheltered by their lowered lids.  Then she noticed for the first time that his face showed the marks of suffering.  It was as if it had dropped suddenly the brilliant mask it wore for her, and given up its secret unaware.  He had suffered so that he had not slept.  It was plain to her in the droop of his eyelids, and in the drawn lines about his eyes and mouth and nostrils.  She was touched with tenderness and pity, and a certain unintelligible awe.  And she knew her hour.  She knew that if she closed her heart now, it would never open to him.  She knew that it was his hour as well as hers.  She felt, reverently, that it was, above all, God’s hour.

She laid her hand on her husband’s gift, saying to herself that if she took that crucifix she would be taking him with it into the holy places of her heart.

“I will take it.”  Her voice came shy and inarticulate as a marriage vow.

“Thank you,” he said.

He wondered if she would turn to him with some sign of tenderness, whether she would stoop to him and touch him with her hand or her lips; or whether she looked to him to offer the first caress.

She did nothing.  It was as if her intentness, her concentration upon her holy purpose held her.  While her soul did but turn to him in the darkness, it kept and would keep their hands and lips apart.

He divined that she was only half-won.  But, though her body yet moved in its charmed inviolate circle, he felt dimly that the spiritual barrier was down.

She turned from him and went slowly to the door.  He opened it and followed her.  On the stairs she parted from him and went alone into his sister’s bedroom.

Edith’s spine had been hurting her in the night.  She lay flat and exhausted, and the embrace of her loving arms was slow and frail.

Edith was what she called “dressed,” and waiting for her sister-in-law.  The little table by her bed was strewn with the presents she had bought and made for Anne.  A birthday was a very serious affair for Edith.  She was not content to buy (buying was nothing; anybody could buy); she must also make, and make beautifully.  “I mayn’t have any legs that can carry me,” said Edith; “but I’ve hands and I will use them.  If it wasn’t for my hands I’d be nothing but a great lumbering, lazy mass of palpitating heart.”  But her making had become every year more and more expensive.  Her beautiful, pitiful embroideries were paid for in bad nights.  And at six o’clock that morning she had given her little dismal cry:  “Oh, Nanna, Nanna, my beast of a spine is going to bother me to-day, and it’s Anne’s birthday!”