ide. She knew how it would
shrink from telling him.

Anne went down to Majendie in the garden and sent him to his sister. They
returned to the house by the open window of his study. A bright fire was
burning in the room. He looked at her shyly and half in doubt, drew up an
arm-chair to the hearth, and left her there.

His manner brought back to her the days of their engagement when that
room had been their refuge. Not that they had often been alone together.
She could count the times on the fingers of one hand, the times when
Edith was too ill to be wheeled into her room. It had been nearly always
in Edith's room that she had seen him, surrounded by all the feminine
devices, the tender trivialities that were part of the moving pathos of
the scene. She had so associated him with his sister that it had been
hard for her to realise that he had any separate life of his own. She
felt that his love for her had simply grown out of his love for Edith,
it was the flame, the flower of his tenderness. It was one with his
goodness, and she had been glad to have it so. There was no jealousy in
Anne.

It came over her now with a fresh shock, how very little, after all, she
had known of him. It was through Edith that she really knew him. And yet
it was impossible that Edith could have absorbed him utterly. Anne had
not counted his business; for it had not interested her, and to say that
Walter was a ship-owner did not define him in the very least. What
remained over of Walter was a secret that this room, his study, must
partially reveal.

She remembered how she had first come there, and had looked shyly about
her for intimations of his inner nature, and how it was his pipe-rack and
his boots that had first suggested that he had a life apart and dealings
with the outer world. Now she rose and went round the room, searching for
its secret, and finding no new impressions, only fresh lights on the old.
If the room told her anything it told her how little Majendie had used
it, how little he had been able to call anything his own. The things in
it had no comfortable look of service. He could not have smoked there
much, the curtains were too innocent. He could not have sat in that
arm-chair much, the surface was too smooth. He could not have come there
much at any time, for, though the carpet was faded, there was no
well-worn passage from the threshold to the hearth. As far as she could
make out he came there for no earthly purpose but t