appeased by the well-ordered, even
passage of her days.

She had made a household religion for herself, and would have suffered in
departing from it. To be always down before her husband for eight-o'clock
breakfast; to sit with Edith from twelve till luncheon time, and in the
early afternoon; to spend her evenings with her husband, reading aloud or
talking, or sitting silent when silence soothed him; these things had
become more sacred and imperative than her attendance at St. Saviour's.
The hours of even-song struck for her no more.

For, above all, she had made a point of always being at home in time for
Majendie's return from his office. At five o'clock she was ready for him,
beside her tea-table, irreproachably dressed. Her friends complained that
they had lost sight of her. Regularly at a quarter to five she would
forsake the drawing-rooms of Thurston Square. However absorbing Mrs.
Eliott's conversation, towards the quarter, the tender abstraction of
Anne's manner showed plainly that her spirit had surrendered to another
charm. Mrs. Eliott, in letting her go, had the air of a person serenely
sane, indulgent to a persistent and punctual obsession. Anne divided her
friends into those who understood and those who didn't. Fanny Eliott
would never understand. But little Mrs. Gardner, through the immortality
of her bridal spirit, understood completely. And for Anne Mrs. Gardner's
understanding of her amounted to an understanding of her husband. Anne's
heart went out to Mrs. Gardner.

Not that she saw much of her, either. She had grown impatient of
interests that lay outside her home. Once she had decided to give herself
up to her husband, other people's claims appeared as an impertinence
beside that perfection of possession.

She was less vividly aware of her own perfect possession of him. Majendie
was hardly aware of it himself. His happiness was so profound that he had
not yet measured it. He, too, had slipped into the same imperturbable
routine. It was seldom that he kept her waiting past five o'clock. He
hated the people who made business appointments with him for that hour.
His old associates saw little of him, and his club knew him no more.
He preferred Anne's society to that of any other person. They had no more
fear of each other. He saw that she was beginning to forget.

In one thing only he was disappointed. The trembling woman who had held
him in her arms at Westleydale had never shown herself to him again