but one consolation.

"At least he does not despise me. I hid it well," she whispered to
herself.

And Kenneth Graham, as he drove away in his cab, repeated to himself,
"She is _so_ cold, this evening particularly. And yet, can it be that it
was to hide any other feeling? If I thought so--good God!" and he half
started up as if to call to the driver, but sat down again. "No, no, I
must not be a fool. I could not stand a repulse from _her_--I could
never see her again. Better not risk it. And then I am so poor!"

And in the bustle and hurry of his departure he tried to forget the
wild fancy which for a moment had disturbed him. He sailed the next
day.

But the few weeks which followed passed heavily for Anne. It was a dead
time of year--there was no special necessity for her exerting herself to
throw off the overwhelming depression, and strong and brave as she was,
she allowed herself, to some extent, to yield to it.

"If only he had not come back--if I had never seen him again!" she
repeated to herself incessantly. "I had in a sense forgotten him--the
thought of him never troubled me all the years of my marriage. I suppose
I had never before understood how I _could_ care. How I wish I had never
learnt it! How I _wish_ he had never come back!"

It was above all in the afternoons--the dull, early dark, autumn
afternoons--which for some weeks had been enlivened by the expectation,
sure two or three times a week to be fulfilled, of Major Graham's
"dropping in"--that the aching pain, the weary longing, grew so bad as
to be well-nigh intolerable.

"How shall I bear it?" said poor Anne to herself sometimes; "it is so
wrong, so unwomanly! So selfish, too, when I think of my children. How
much I have to be thankful for--why should I ruin my life by crying for
the one thing that is not for me? It is worse, far worse than if he had
died; had I known that he had loved me, I could have borne his death, it
seems to me."

She was sitting alone one afternoon about five weeks after Kenneth had
left, thinking sadly over and over the same thoughts, when a tap at the
door made her look up.

"Come in," she said, though the tap hardly sounded like that of her
maid, and no one else was likely to come to the door of her own room
where she happened to be. "Come in," and somewhat to her surprise the
door half opened and old Ambrose's voice replied--

"If you please, ma'am----" then stopped and hesitated.

"Come in," she repeated wi