band: the three beings who filled her life. She smiled a
little at the happy picture they presented, Effie's gambols encircling
it in a moving frame within which the two men came slowly forward in the
silence of friendly understanding. It seemed part of the deep intimacy
of the scene that they should not be talking to each other, and it did
not till afterward strike her as odd that neither of them apparently
felt it necessary to address a word to Sophy Viner.

Anna herself, at the moment, was floating in the mid-current of
felicity, on a tide so bright and buoyant that she seemed to be one with
its warm waves. The first rush of bliss had stunned and dazzled her;
but now that, each morning, she woke to the calm certainty of its
recurrence, she was growing used to the sense of security it gave.

"I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown
out of me like wings." So she phrased it to Darrow, as, later in the
morning, they paced the garden-paths together. His answering look gave
her the same assurance of safety. The evening before he had seemed
preoccupied, and the shadow of his mood had faintly encroached on the
great golden orb of their blessedness; but now it was uneclipsed again,
and hung above them high and bright as the sun at noon.

Upstairs in her sitting-room, that afternoon, she was thinking of
these things. The morning mists had turned to rain, compelling the
postponement of an excursion in which the whole party were to have
joined. Effie, with her governess, had been despatched in the motor to
do some shopping at Francheuil; and Anna had promised Darrow to join
him, later in the afternoon, for a quick walk in the rain.

He had gone to his room after luncheon to get some belated letters off
his conscience; and when he had left her she had continued to sit in the
same place, her hands crossed on her knees, her head slightly bent, in
an attitude of brooding retrospection. As she looked back at her past
life, it seemed to her to have consisted of one ceaseless effort to pack
into each hour enough to fill out its slack folds; but now each moment
was like a miser's bag stretched to bursting with pure gold.

She was roused by the sound of Owen's step in the gallery outside her
room. It paused at her door and in answer to his knock she called out
"Come in!"

As the door closed behind him she was struck by his look of pale
excitement, and an impulse of compunction made her say: "You've co