ose lips that shook with every word.
"Go away. Don't come near me."

"Nancy--what is it?"

She turned from him, and leaned up against the folded window shutter. Her
emotion was the more terrible to him because she was so seldom given to
these outbursts. She had seemed to him a woman passionless, and of almost
superhuman self-possession. He removed himself to the hearth-rug and
waited for five minutes.

"Poor child," he said at last. "Can't you tell me what it is?"

No answer.

He waited another five minutes, thinking hard.

"Was it--was it what I said about Mrs. Gardner?"

He still waited. Then he conceived a happy idea. He would try to make her
laugh.

"Just because I said she'd had a little son?"

Her tears fell to answer him.

She gathered herself together with a supreme effort, and steadied her
lips to speak. "Please leave me. I came here to be alone."

A light broke in on him, and he left her.

He shut himself up in the dining-room with his light. He had pushed his
breakfast aside, too preoccupied to eat it.

"So that's it?" he said to himself. "That's it. Poor Nancy. That's what
she's wanted all the time. What a fool I was never to have thought of
it."

He breathed with an immense relief. He had solved the enigma of Anne with
all her "funniness." It was not that she had turned against him, nor
against her destiny. She had been disappointed of her destiny, that was
all. It was enough. She must have been fretting for months, poor darling,
and just when she could bear it no longer, Mrs. Gardner, he supposed, had
come as the last straw. No wonder that she had said he was unkind.

And in that hour of his enlightenment a great chastening fell upon
Majendie. He told himself that he must be as gentle with her as he knew
how; gentler than he had ever yet known how. And his heart smote him as
he thought how he had hurt her, how he might hurt her again unknowingly,
and how the tenderness of the tenderest male was brutality when applied
to these wonderful, pitiful, incomprehensible things that women were.
He accepted the misery of the last three months as a fit punishment for
his lack of understanding.

His light brought a great longing to him and a great hope. From that
moment he watched her anxiously. He had never realised till now, after
three months of misery, quite what she meant to him, how sacred and dear
she was, and how much he loved her.

The depth of this feeling left him for the most part dum