it, but his eyes gleamed with a
lambent triumph. They said, "Sooner or later. But rather sooner than I
had expected."

Anne presented her case in a veiled form, as a situation in the abstract.
She scrupulously refrained from mentioning any names.

The Canon smiled at her precautions. "We are working in the dark," said
he. "I think I can help you a little bit more if you'll allow me to come
down to the concrete. You are speaking, I fancy, of our poor friend, Mr.
Gorst?"

She looked at him helplessly, startled at his penetration and her own
betrayal, but appeased by the pitying adjective which brought Gorst into
the regions of pardonable discussion.

"You needn't be afraid," he said. "I had to be certain before I could
advise you. I can now tell you with confidence that you are doing right.
I--know--the--man."

He uttered the phrase with measured emphasis, and closed his teeth upon
the last words with a snap. It was impossible to convey a stronger effect
of moral reprobation. "But I see your difficulty," he continued. "I
understand that he is a rather intimate friend of Miss Majendie."

Anne noticed that he deliberately avoided all mention of her husband.

"She has known him for a very long time."

"Ah yes. And it is your affection, your pity for your sister that makes
you hesitate. You do not wish to be hard, and at the same time you wish
to do right. Is it not so?"

She murmured her assent. (How well he understood her!)

"Ah, my dear Mrs. Majendie, we have sometimes to be a little hard, in
order that we may not be harder. You have thought, perhaps, that you
should be tender to this friendship? Now, I am an old man, and I have had
a pretty large experience of men and women, and I tell you that such
friendships are unwholesome. Unwholesome. Both for the woman and the
man."

"If I thought that--"

"You may think it. Look at the man--What has it done for him? Has it made
him any better, any stronger, any purer? Has it made her any happier?"

"I think so. It is all she has--"

"How can you say that, my dear Mrs. Majendie, when she has you?"

"And her brother."

The Canon gave her a keen glance. He seemed to be turning a little extra
light on to her secret, to see it the better by. And under that light her
mind conceived again a miserable suspicion.

"He knows something," she thought. "What is it that he knows? They all
seem to know."

She turned the subject back again to her sister-in-law and Mr. Gorst