“I wonder, Nancy,” he once said to her, “if you know how divinely sweet your voice is?”

“I shall begin to think it is, if you think so,” said she.

“And would you think yourself beautiful, if I thought so?”

“Very beautiful.  At any rate, as beautiful as I want to be.”

He could not control the demonstration provoked by that admission, and she asked him if he were coming to church with her to-morrow.

His Nancy chose her moments strangely.

But not for worlds would he have admitted that she was deficient in a sense of humour.  She had her small hilarities that passed for it.  Keenness in that direction would have done violence to the repose and sweetness of her blessed presence.  The peace of it remained with him during his hours of business.

Anne did not like his business.  But, in spite of it, she was proud of him, of his appearance, his charm, his distinction, his entire superiority to even the aristocracy of Scale.

She no longer resented his indifference to her friends in Thurston Square, since it meant that he desired to have her to himself.  Of his own friends he had seen little, and she nothing.  If she had not pressed Fanny Eliott on him, he had spared her Mrs. Lawson Hannay and Mrs. Dick Ransome.  She had been fortunate enough to find both these ladies out when she returned their calls.  And Majendie had spoken of his most intimate friend, Charlie Gorst, as absent on a holiday in Norway.

It was, therefore, in a mood of more than usual concession that she proposed to return, now in October, the second advance made to her by Mrs. Hannay in July.

Majendie was relieved to think that he would no longer be compelled to perjure himself on Anne’s account.  The Hannays had frequently reproached him with his wife’s unreadiness in response, and (as he had told her) he had exhausted all acceptable explanations of her conduct.  He had “worked” her headaches “for all they were worth” with Hannay; for weeks he had kept Hannay’s wife from calling, by the fiction, discreetly presented, of a severe facial neuralgia; and his last shameless intimation, that Anne was “rather shy, you know,” had been received with a respectful incredulity that left him with nothing more to say.

Mrs. Hannay was not at home when Anne called, for Anne had deliberately avoided her “day.”  But Mrs. Hannay was irrepressibly forgiving, and Anne found herself invited to dine at the Hannays’ with her husband early in the following week.  It was hardly an hour since she had left Mrs. Hannay’s doorstep when the pressing, the almost alarmingly affectionate little note came hurrying after her.

“I’ll go, dear, if you really want me to,” said she.

“Well—­I think, if you don’t mind.  The Hannays have been awfully good to me.”

So they went.

“Don’t snub the poor little woman too unmercifully,” was Edith’s parting charge.