“As long as Edie goes on seeing him, he’ll think it’s all right.”

Overhead Mr. Gorst’s gay tune proclaimed that indeed he thought so.  He broke off suddenly, and began another and a better one, till the spirit of levity ran riot in immortal sounds.

“So it’s all right.  She’s a good woman.  It’s the only hold we’ve got on him.”

“If all good women were to reason that way—­”

“If all good women were to reason your way, what do you think would happen?”

“There would be more good men in the world.”

“Would there?  There would be more good men ruined by bad women.  Because, don’t you see, there’d be no others left for them to speak to.”

“If you’re thinking of his good—­”

“Have you thought of hers?”

“Yes.  Supposing he ends by marrying somebody else, what will she do then?—­poor Edie!”

“If the somebody else is a good woman, poor Edie will fold her dear little hands, and offer up a dear little prayer of thankfulness to heaven.”

Upstairs the music ceased.  The prodigal’s footsteps were heard crossing the room and coming to a halt by Edith’s couch.

Majendie rose, placid and benignant.

“I think,” said he, “it’s time for you to go to bed.”

CHAPTER XVI

Majendie could never be angry with any woman for more than five minutes.  And this time he understood his wife better than she knew.  He had seen, as Edith had said, “everything.”

But Anne was convinced that he never would see.  She said to herself, “He thinks me hard, and obstinate, and cruel.”

She crept into bed in misery that suggested a defeated thing.  The outward eye would never have perceived that the pale woman quivering under the eider-down was inspired with an indomitable purpose, the salvation of a weak man from his weakness.  To be sure, she had been worsted in her encounter by something that conveyed the illusion of superior moral force.  But that there was any strength in her husband that could be described as moral Anne would not have admitted for a moment.  She believed herself to be crushed, grossly, by the superior weight of moral deadness that he carried.

It was, it always had been, his placidity that caused her most despair.  But whereas, at the time of their first rupture, it had made him utterly impenetrable, she now took it simply as one more sign of his inability to understand her.  She argued that he would never have remained so calm if he had realised the sincerity of her determination to repudiate Mr. Gorst.  Of course she didn’t expect him to appreciate the force and the fine quality of her feeling.  Still, he might at least have known that, if she had found it hard to pardon her own husband his lapses in the past, she would not be likely to accept a recent and notorious evildoer.