uld
not fulfil. And she would remain in her place of peace, building up
between them the ramparts of the spiritual life.

Meanwhile she gave him credit for his attitude.

"Things can never be as they were between us," she said. "That you cannot
expect. But--"

He listened with his eyes fixed on hers, accepting from her his destiny.
She reddened.

"It was good of you to offer to release me--" He spared her.

"Are you not going to hold me to it, then?"

"I am not." She paused, and then forced herself to it. "I will try to be
a good wife to you."

"Thank you."

CHAPTER III

It was impossible for them to stay any longer at Scarby. The place was
haunted by the presence and the voice of scandalous rumour. Anne had the
horrible idea that it had been also a haunt of Lady Cayley, of the infamy
itself.

The week-old honeymoon looked at them out of its clouds with such an
aged, sinister, and disastrous aspect that they resolved to get away from
it. For the sake of appearances, they spent another week of aimless
wandering on the East coast, before returning to the town where an
unintelligible fate had decided that Majendie should have a business he
detested, and a house.

Anne had once asked herself what she would do if she were told that
she would have to spend all her life in Scale on Humber. Scale is
prevailingly, conspicuously commercial. It is not beautiful. Its streets
are squalidly flat, its houses meanly rectangular. The colouring of Scale
is thought by some to be peculiarly abominable. It is built in brown,
paved and pillared in unclean grey. Its rivers and dykes run brown under
a grey northeastern sky.

Once a year it yields reluctantly to strange passion, and Spring is
born in Scale; born in tortures almost human, a relentless immortality
struggling with visible corruption. The wonder is that it should be born
at all.

To-day, the day of their return, the March wind had swept the streets
clean, and the evening had secret gold and sharp silver in its grey. Anne
remembered how, only last year, she had looked upon such a spring on the
day when she guessed for the first time that Walter cared for her. She
was not highly endowed with imagination; still, even she had felt dimly,
and for once in her life, that sense of mortal tenderness and divine
uplifting which is the message of Spring to all lovers.

But that emotion, which had had its momentary intensity for Anne
Fletcher, was over and done with