He pondered for a long time over that.  Seeing Edith was the best thing he could do.  To-night it seemed the only good thing left for him to do.  He lived in a state of alternate excitement and fatigue, forever craving his innocent amusements, and forever tired of them.  None of them were worth while.  Seeing Edith was the only thing that was worth while.  He refused to contemplate with any calmness a life in which it would be impossible for him to see her.  If the poor prodigal had not chosen the most elevated situation for the building of his house of life, he was always making desperate efforts to leave the insalubrious spot, and return to the high and windswept mansions of his youth.  To be with Edith was to nourish the illusion of return.  Return itself seemed possible, when goodness, in the person of Edith, looked at him with such tender and alluring eyes.  In spirit he prostrated himself before it, while he cursed the damnable cruelty that had prevented him from marrying her.  Through that act of adoration he was enabled to live through his alien and separated days.  It kept him, as he phrased it, “going,” which meant that, wherever his rebellious feet might carry him, he continued to breathe, through it, the diviner air.

And Edith had lain for ten years on her back, and every year the hours had gone more lightly, through the hope of seeing him.  She had outlived her time of torment and rebellion.  There was a sense in which her life, in spite of its frustration, was complete.  The love through which her womanhood struggled for victory in defeat had fulfilled itself by gradual growth into something like maternal passion.  There was no selfishness in her attitude to him and his devotion.  By accepting it she took his best and offered it to God for him.  With fragile, dedicated hands she nursed and sheltered the undying votive flame.  She seemed a saint who had foregone heaven and remained on earth to help him.  Her womanhood, wrapped from him in veil upon veil of her mysterious suffering, had never removed itself from him.  She held him by all that was indomitable in her own nature, and in spite of his lapses, he remained her lover.

She was aware of these lapses and grieved over them and forgave them, laying them, as she had laid her brother’s sin, to the account of her unhappy spine.  In Edith’s tender fancy her spine had become responsible for all the shortcomings of these beloved persons.  If Walter could have married Anne seven years ago there would have been no dreadful Lady Cayley; and if she could have married poor Charlie she would not have had to think of him as “poor Charlie” now.  It had been hard on him.

That was precisely what poor Charlie was thinking.  And if that sister-in-law was to come between them, too, it would be harder still.  But Edith insisted that she would make no difference.

“In fact,” said she, “you can come more than ever.  For if Walter’s absorbed in Anne, and Anne’s absorbed in Walter—­”