It was better to lie on a couch than stand on a pedestal; you knew, at
any rate, where you were).

Now, as Edith also said, there can be nothing more prostrating to a
woman's pride than a bad bilious attack. Especially when it exposes you
to the devoted ministrations of a husband you have made up your mind to
disapprove of, and compels you to a baffling view of him.

Anne owned herself baffled.

Her attack had chastened her. She had been touched by Walter's kindness,
by the evidence (if she had needed it) that she was as dear to him in her
ignominious agony as she had been in the beauty of her triumphal health.
As he moved about her, he became to her insistent outward sense the man
she had loved because of his goodness. It was so that she had first seen
his strong masculine figure moving about Edith on her couch, handling
her with the supreme gentleness of strength. She had not been two days in
the house in Prior Street before her memories assailed her. Her new and
detestable view of Walter contended with her old beloved vision of him.
The two were equally real, equally vivid, and she could not reconcile
them. Walter himself, seen again in his old surroundings, was protected
by an army of associations. The manifestations of his actual presence
were also such as to appeal to her memory against her judgment. Her
memory was in league with her. But when the melting mood came over her,
her conscience resisted and rose against them both.

Edith, watching for the propitious moment, could not tell by what signs
she would recognise it when it came. Her own hour was the early evening.
She had always brightened towards six o'clock, the time of her brother's
home-coming.

To-day he had removed himself, to give her her chance with Anne. She
could see him pottering about the garden below her window. He had kept
that garden with care. He had mown and sown, and planted, and weeded,
and watered it, that Edith might always have something pretty to look at
from her window. With its green grass plot and gay beds, the tiny oblong
space defied the extending grime and gloom of Scale. This year he had
planted it for Anne. He had set a thousand bulbs for her, and many
thousand flowers were to have sprung up in time to welcome her. But
something had gone wrong with them. They had suffered by his absence. As
Edith looked out of the window he was stooping low, on acutely bended
knees, sorrowfully preoccupied with a broken hyacinth. He had hi