“And that he’s married a wife who sets him the example,” said Anne, returning from the window-sill refreshed.

“She keeps him straight, dear.”

“Edith!  I shall never understand you.  You’re angelically good.  But it’s horrible, the things you take for granted.  ‘She keeps him straight!’”

“You think I take for granted a natural tendency to crookedness.  I don’t—­I don’t.  What I take for granted is a natural tendency to straightness, when it gets its way.  It doesn’t always get it, though, especially in a town like Scale.”

“I wish we were out of it.”

“So did I, dear, once; but I don’t now.  We must make the best of it.”

“Has Walter paid any of that money back to Mr. Hannay?”

Edith looked up at her sister-in-law, startled by the hardness in her voice.  She had meant to spare Anne’s pride the worst blow, but something in her question stirred the fire that slept in Edith.

“No,” she said, “he hasn’t.  He was going to, but Mr. Hannay cancelled the debt, in order that he might marry—­that he might marry you.”

Anne drew back as if Edith had struck her bodily.  She, then, had been bought, too, with Mr. Hannay’s money.  Without it, Walter could not have afforded to marry her; for she was poor.

She sat silent, until her self-appointed hour with Edith ended; and then, still silently, she left the room.

And Edith turned her cheek on her cushions and sobbed weakly to herself.  “Walter would never forgive me if he knew I’d told her that.  It was awful of me.  But Anne would have provoked the patience of a saint.”

Anne owned that Edith was a saint, and that the provocation was extreme.

In the afternoon, Edith, at her own request, was forgiven, and Anne, by way of proving and demonstrating her forgiveness, announced her amiable intention of calling on Mrs. Hannay on her “day.”

The day fell within a week of the dinner.  It was agreed that Majendie was to meet his wife at the Hannays, and to take her home.  There was a good mile between Prior Street and the Park; and Anne was a leisurely walker; so it happened that she was late, and that Majendie had arrived a few minutes before her.  She did not notice him there all at once.  Mrs. Hannay was a sociable little lady; the radius of her circle was rapidly increasing, and her “day” drew crowds.  The lamps were not yet lit, and as Anne entered the room, it was dim to her after the daylight of the open air.  She had counted on an inconspicuous entrance, and was astonished to find that the announcement of her name caused a curious disturbance and division in the assembly.  A finer ear than Anne’s might have detected an ominous sound, something like the rustling of leaves before a storm.  But Anne’s self-possession rendered her at times insensible to changes in the social atmosphere.  In any case the slight commotion was no more than she had come prepared for in a whole roomful of ill-bred persons.