"Edie--"

"Do you like them?"

"Like them? Oh, you dear--"

"Why don't you have a birthday oftener? It makes you look so pretty,
dear."

Anne's heart leaped. Edie's ways, her very words sometimes were like
Walter's.

"Has Walter seen you?"

Anne's face became instantly solemn, but it was not sad.

"Edie," she said, "do you know what he has given me!"

"Yes," said Edith. Her eyes searched Anne's eyes with pain in them that
was somehow akin to Walter's pain.

"She knows everything," thought Anne, "and it was her idea, then, not
his."

"Edith," said she, "was it you who thought of it, or he?"

"I? Never. He didn't say a word about it. He just went and got it. He
thought it all out by himself, poor dear."

"Can you think why he thought of it?"

"Yes," said Edith gravely, "I can. Can't you?"

Anne was silent.

"It's very simple. He wants you to trust him a little more, that's all."

Anne's mouth trembled, and she tightened it.

"Are you afraid of him?"

"Yes," she said, "I am."

"Because you think he isn't very spiritual?"

"Perhaps."

"Oh, but he's on his way there," said Edith. "He's human. You've got to
be human before you can be spiritual. It's a most important part of the
process. Don't you omit it."

"Have I omitted it?"

She stroked one of the thin hands that were out-stretched towards her on
the coverlet, and the other closed on her caress. The touch brought the
tears into her eyes. She raised her head to keep them from falling.

"Dear," said Edith, and paused and reiterated, "dear, you have about all
the big things that I haven't. You're splendid. There's only one thing I
want for you. If you could only see how divinely sacred the human part of
us is--and how pathetic."

Anne looked at her as she lay there, bright and brave, untroubled by her
own mortal pathos. In her, humanity, woman's humanity, was reduced to its
simplest expression of spiritual loving and bodily suffering. Anne was a
child in her ignorance of the things that had been revealed to Edith
lying there.

Looking at her, Anne's tears grew heavy and fell.

"It's your birthday," said Edith softly.

And as she heard Majendie's foot on the stairs Anne dried her eyes on the
birthday pocket handkerchief.

"Here she is," said Edith as he entered. "What are you going to do with
her? She doesn't have a birthday every day."

"I'm going," he said, "to take her down to breakfast."

Their meals so abounded in occasions for