Anne, bearing her belief in Majendie in her innocent breast, failed at first to connect her husband with the remarkable intimations that passed between the two newcomers gossiping in the drawing-room before dinner.  They, for their part, had no clue linking the unapproachably strange lady on the neighbouring sofa with the hero of their tale.  The case, they said, was “infamous.”  At that point Majendie had put an end to his own history and his wife’s uncertainty by entering the room.  Three words and a look, observed by Anne, had established his identity.

Her mind was steadied by its inalienable possession of the facts.  She had returned through prayer to her normal mood of religious resignation.  She tried to support herself further by a chain of reasoning.  If all things were divinely ordered, this sorrow also was the will of God.  It was the burden she was appointed to take up and bear.

She bathed and dressed herself for the day.  She felt so strange to herself in these familiar processes that, standing before the looking-glass, she was curious to observe what manner of woman she had become.  The inner upheaval had been so profound that she was surprised to find so little record of it in her outward seeming.

Anne was a woman whose beauty was a thing of general effect, and the general effect remained uninjured.  Nature had bestowed on her a body strongly made and superbly fashioned.  Having framed her well, she coloured her but faintly.  She had given her eyes of a light thick grey.  Her eyebrows, her lashes, and her hair were of a pale gold that had ashen undershades in it.  They all but matched a skin honey-white with that even, sombre, untransparent tone that belongs to a temperament at once bilious and robust.  For the rest, Nature had aimed nobly at the significance of the whole, slurring the details.  She had built up the forehead low and wide, thrown out the eyebones as a shelter for the slightly prominent eyes; saved the short, straight line of the nose by a hair’s-breadth from a tragic droop.  But she had scamped her work in modelling the close, narrow nostrils.  She had merged the lower lip with the line of the chin, missing the classic indentation.  The mouth itself she had left unfinished.  Only a little amber mole, verging on the thin rose of the upper lip, foreshortened it, and gave to its low arc the emphasis of a curve, the vivacity of a dimple (Anne’s under lip was straight as the tense string of a bow).  When she spoke or smiled Anne’s mole seemed literally to catch up her lip against its will, on purpose to show the small white teeth below.  Majendie loved Anne’s mole.  It was that one charming and emphatic fault in her face, he said, that made it human.  But Anne was ashamed of it.

She surveyed her own reflection in the glass sadly, and sadly went through the practised, mechanical motions of her dressing; smoothing the back of her irreproachable coat, arranging her delicate laces with a deftness no indifference could impair.  Yesterday she had had delight in that new garment and in her own appearance.  She knew that Majendie admired her for her distinction and refinement.  Now she wondered what he could have seen in her—­after Lady Cayley.  At Lady Cayley’s personality she had not permitted herself so much as to guess.  Enough that the woman was notorious—­infamous.