Majendie’s figure was not diminished by the background.  The smallest nervous movement on his part would have undone him, but he did not move.  His profound stillness, suggesting an interminable patience, gave him a beautiful immensity of his own.

Anne, left in her charmed, inviolate circle, surrendered sweetly to the spirit of Westleydale.

The place was peace folded upon the breast of peace.

Presently she spoke, calling his name, as if out of the far-off unutterable peace.

“Walter, it was kind of you to bring me here.”

“I am so glad you like it.”

“I do indeed.”

He tried to say more, but his heart choked him.

She closed her eyes, and the peace poured over her, and sank in.  Her heart beat quietly.

She opened her eyes and turned them on her husband.  She knew that it was his gaze that had compelled them to open.  She smiled to herself, like a young girl, shyly but happily aware of him, and turned from him to her contemplation of the woods.

Anne had always rather prided herself on her susceptibility to the beauty of nature, but it had never before reached her with this poignant touch.  Hitherto she had drawn it in with her eyes only; now it penetrated her through every nerve.  She was vaguely but deliciously aware of her own body as a part of it, and of her husband’s joy in contemplating her.

“He thinks me good-looking,” she said to herself, and the thought came to her as a revelation.

Then her young memory woke again and thrust at her.

“He thinks me good-looking.  That’s why he married me.”

She longed to find out if it were so.

“Walter,” said she, “I want to ask you a question.”

“Well—­if it’s an easy one.”

“It isn’t—­very.  What made you want to marry me?”

He paused a moment, searching for the truth.

“Your goodness.”

“Is that really true?”

“To the best of my belief, madam, it is.”

“But there are so many other women better than me.”

“Possibly.  I haven’t been happy enough to meet them.”

“And if you had met them?”

“As far as I can make out, I shouldn’t have fallen in love with them.  I shouldn’t have fallen in love with you, if it hadn’t been for your goodness.  But I shouldn’t have fallen in love with your goodness in any other woman.”

“Have you known many other women?”

“One way and another, in the course of my life—­yes.  And what I liked so much about you was your difference from those other women.  You gave me rest from them and their ways.  They bored me even when I was half in love with them, and made me restless for them even when I wasn’t a little bit.  It was as if they were always expecting something from me—­I couldn’t for the life of me tell what—­always on the look out, don’t you know, for some mysterious moment that never arrived.”