t."

She hid her face from the anguish.

"You needn't. That's it. It rests with you."

"With me? If you would only tell me how."

"I can't tell you anything. It'll come. Probably in the way you least
expect it. But--it'll come."

"Edie, I feel as if you held us all together. And when you've gone--"

"You mean when _it's_ gone. When it's 'gone,'" said Edie, smiling. "I
shall hold you together all the more. You needn't sigh like that."

"Did I sigh?"

As Anne stooped over the bed she sighed again, thinking how Edith's
loving arms used to leap up and hold her, and how they could never hold
anything any more.

Of all the things that Edith said to her that afternoon, two remained
fixed in Anne's memory: how Peggy would suffer through overmuch
loving--she remembered that saying, because it had confirmed her terror;
and how love was a provision for the soul's redemption of the body, or
for the body's redemption of the soul. This she remembered, because she
did not understand it.

That was in August. Before the month was out they were beginning to give
Edith morphia.

In September Gorst came to see her for the last time.

In October she died in her brother's arms.

In the days that followed, it was as if her spirit, refusing to depart
from them, had rested on the sister she had loved. Spirit to spirit,
she stooped, kindling in Anne her own dedicated flame. In the white
death-chamber, and through the quiet house, the presence of Anne, moving
with a hushed footfall, was like the presence of a blessed spirit. Her
face was as a face long hidden upon the heart of peace. Her very grief
aspired; it had wings, lifting her towards her sister in her heavenly
place.

For Anne, in the days that followed, was possessed by a great and burning
charity. Mrs. Hannay called and was taken into the white room to see
Edith. And Anne's heart went out to Mrs. Hannay, when she spoke of the
beauty and goodness of Edith; and to Lawson Hannay, when he pressed her
hand without speaking; and to Gorst, when she saw him stealing on tiptoe
from Edith's room, his face swollen and inflamed with grief. Her heart
went out to all of them, because they had loved Edith.

And to her husband her heart went out with a tenderness born of an
immense pity and compassion. For the first three days, Majendie gave no
sign that he was shaken by his sister's death. But on the evening of the
day they buried her, Anne found him in the study, sitting in his low