the world. Her
very ways, the very mark of her eyebrows were symbols and
indication to him. There, on the farm with her, he lived through
a mystery of life and death and creation, strange, profound
ecstasies and incommunicable satisfactions, of which the rest of
the world knew nothing; which made the pair of them apart and
respected in the English village, for they were also
well-to-do.

But Anna was only half safe within her mother's unthinking
knowledge. She had a mother-of-pearl rosary that had been her
own father's. What it meant to her she could never say. But the
string of moonlight and silver, when she had it between her
fingers, filled her with strange passion. She learned at school
a little Latin, she learned an Ave Maria and a Pater Noster, she
learned how to say her rosary. But that was no good. "Ave Maria,
gratia plena, Dominus tecum, Benedicta tu in mulieribus et
benedictus fructus ventris tui Jesus. Ave Maria, Sancta Maria,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae,
Amen."

It was not right, somehow. What these words meant when
translated was not the same as the pale rosary meant. There was
a discrepancy, a falsehood. It irritated her to say, "Dominus
tecum," or, "benedicta tu in mulieribus." She loved the mystic
words, "Ave Maria, Sancta Maria;" she was moved by "benedictus
fructus ventris tui Jesus," and by "nunc et in hora mortis
nostrae." But none of it was quite real. It was not
satisfactory, somehow.

She avoided her rosary, because, moving her with curious
passion as it did, it meant only these not very
significant things. She put it away. It was her instinct to put
all these things away. It was her instinct to avoid thinking, to
avoid it, to save herself.

She was seventeen, touchy, full of spirits, and very moody:
quick to flush, and always uneasy, uncertain. For some reason or
other, she turned more to her father, she felt almost flashes of
hatred for her mother. Her mother's dark muzzle and curiously
insidious ways, her mother's utter surety and confidence, her
strange satisfaction, even triumph, her mother's way of laughing
at things and her mother's silent overriding of vexatious
propositions, most of all her mother's triumphant power maddened
the girl.

She became sudden and incalculable. Often she stood at the
window, looking out, as if she wanted to go. Sometimes she went,
she mixed with people. But always she came home in anger, as if
she were diminished, beli