“And what else,” said Nanna severely, “do you expect, Miss Edith?”

“I didn’t expect this.  I do believe it’s getting worse.”

“Worse?” Nanna was contemptuous.  “It was worse on Master Walter’s birthday last year.”

(Last year she had made a waistcoat.)

“I can’t think,” moaned Edith, “why it’s always bad on birthdays.”

But however badly “it” might behave in the night, it was never permitted to destroy the spirit of the day.

Anne looked anxiously at the collapsed, exhausted figure in the bed.

“Yes,” said Edith, having smiled at her sister-in-law with magnificent mendacity, “you may well look at me.  You couldn’t make yourself as flat as I am if you tried.  There are two books for you, and a thingummy-jig, and a handkerchief to blow your dear nose with.”

“Edie—­”

“Do you like them?”

“Like them?  Oh, you dear—­”

“Why don’t you have a birthday oftener?  It makes you look so pretty, dear.”

Anne’s heart leaped.  Edie’s ways, her very words sometimes were like Walter’s.

“Has Walter seen you?”

Anne’s face became instantly solemn, but it was not sad.

“Edie,” she said, “do you know what he has given me!”

“Yes,” said Edith.  Her eyes searched Anne’s eyes with pain in them that was somehow akin to Walter’s pain.

“She knows everything,” thought Anne, “and it was her idea, then, not his.”

“Edith,” said she, “was it you who thought of it, or he?”

“I?  Never.  He didn’t say a word about it.  He just went and got it.  He thought it all out by himself, poor dear.”

“Can you think why he thought of it?”

“Yes,” said Edith gravely, “I can.  Can’t you?”

Anne was silent.

“It’s very simple.  He wants you to trust him a little more, that’s all.”

Anne’s mouth trembled, and she tightened it.

“Are you afraid of him?”

“Yes,” she said, “I am.”

“Because you think he isn’t very spiritual?”

“Perhaps.”

“Oh, but he’s on his way there,” said Edith.  “He’s human.  You’ve got to be human before you can be spiritual.  It’s a most important part of the process.  Don’t you omit it.”

“Have I omitted it?”

She stroked one of the thin hands that were out-stretched towards her on the coverlet, and the other closed on her caress.  The touch brought the tears into her eyes.  She raised her head to keep them from falling.

“Dear,” said Edith, and paused and reiterated, “dear, you have about all the big things that I haven’t.  You’re splendid.  There’s only one thing I want for you.  If you could only see how divinely sacred the human part of us is—­and how pathetic.”

Anne looked at her as she lay there, bright and brave, untroubled by her own mortal pathos.  In her, humanity, woman’s humanity, was reduced to its simplest expression of spiritual loving and bodily suffering.  Anne was a child in her ignorance of the things that had been revealed to Edith lying there.