She paused, gazing at him.  He would have kissed her, hoping thus to make his peace with her; but she broke from him.

“Ah,” she cried, “you are reminding me of it now.”

He opened the door, dumb with amazement, and turned from her as she went through.

CHAPTER XIV

It was a fine day, early in November, and Anne was walking alone along one of the broad flat avenues that lead from Scale into the country beyond.  Made restless by her trouble, she had acquired this pedestrian habit lately, and Majendie encouraged her in it, regarding it less as a symptom than as a cure.  She had flagged a little in the autumn, and he was afraid that the strain of her devotion to Edith was beginning to tell upon her health.  On Saturdays and Sundays they generally walked together, and he did his best to make his companionship desirable.  Anne, given now to much self-questioning as to their relations, owned, in an access of justice, that she enjoyed these expeditions.  Whatever else she had found her husband, she had never yet found him dull.  But it did not occur to her, any more than it occurred to Majendie, to consider whether she herself were brilliant.

She made a point of never refusing him her society.  She had persuaded herself that she went with him for his own good.  If he wanted to take long walks in the country, it was her duty as his wife to accompany him.  She was sustained perpetually by her consciousness of doing her duty as his wife; and she had persuaded herself also that she found her peace in it.  She kept his hours for him as punctually as ever; she aimed more than ever at perfection in her household ways.  He should never be able to say that there was one thing in which she had failed him.

No; she knew that neither he nor Edith, if they tried, could put their finger on any point, and say:  There, or there, she had gone wrong.  Not in her understanding of him.  She told herself that she understood him completely now, to her own great unhappiness.  The unhappiness was the price she paid for her understanding.

She was absorbed in these reflections as she turned (in order to be home by five o’clock), and walked towards the town.  She was awakened from them by the trampling of hoofs and the cheerful tootling of a horn.  A four-in-hand approached and passed her; not so furiously but that she had time to recognise Lady Cayley on the box-seat, Mr. Gorst beside her, driving, and Mr. Ransome and Mr. Hannay behind amongst a perfect horticultural show in millinery.

Anne had no acquaintance with the manners and customs of the Scale and Beesly Four-in-hand Club, and her intuition stopped short of recognising Miss Gwen Richards, of the Vaudeville, and the others.  All the same her private arraignment of these ladies refused them whatever benefit they were entitled to from any doubt.  Not that Anne wasted thought on them.  In spite of her condemnation, they barely counted; they were mere attendants, accessories in the vision of sin presented by Lady Cayley.