chair by the fire, his head sunk, his body bowed forward over his knees,
convulsed with a nervous shivering. He started and stared at her
approach, and straightened himself suddenly. She held out her hand. He
looked at it dumbly, as if unwilling or afraid to take it.

"My dear," she said softly.

Then she knelt beside him, and drew his head down upon her breast, and
let it rest there.

CHAPTER XXVII

It was a Thursday night in October, three weeks after Edith's death. Anne
was in her room, undressing. She moved noiselessly, with many tender
precautions, for fear of waking Peggy, and for fear of destroying the
peace that possessed her own soul like heavenly sleep. It was the mystic
mood that went before prayer.

In those three weeks Anne felt that she had been brought very near to
God. She had not known such stillness and content since the days at
Scarby that had made her life terrible. It was as if Edith's spirit in
bliss had power given it to help her sister, to draw Anne with it into
the divine presence.

And the dead woman bound the living to each other also, as she had said.
How she bound them Anne had not realised until to-day. It was Mrs.
Elliott's day, her Thursday. Anne had spent half an hour in Thurston
Square, and had come away with a cold, unsatisfactory feeling towards
Fanny. Fanny, for the first time, had jarred on her. She had so plainly
hesitated between condolence and congratulation. She seemed to be
secretly rejoicing in Edith Majendie's death. Her manner intimated
clearly that a burden had been removed from her friend's life, and that
the time had now come for Anne to blossom out and enjoy herself. Anne had
been glad to get away from Fanny, to come back to the house in Prior
Street and to find Walter waiting for her. Fanny, in spite of her
intellectual rarity, lacked the sense that, after all, _he_ had, the
sense of Edith's spiritual perfection. Strangely, inconsistently,
incomprehensibly, he had it. He and his wife had that in common, if they
had nothing else. They were bound to each other by Edith's dear and
sacred memory, an immaterial, immortal tie. They would always share their
knowledge of her. Other people might take for granted that her terrible
illness had loosened, little by little, the bond that held them to her.
They knew that it was not so. They never found themselves declining on
the mourner's pitiful commonplaces, "Poor Edie"; "She is released"; "It's
a mercy she was take