truggled with an
insufficiently subservient shirt, he laughed, from mere miserable
nervousness. Anne, not recognising the utterance of his helpless
humanity, put that laugh down to the account of the devil that had
insulted her. Her heart grew harder.

"I am clothed, and in my right mind," said Majendie, standing before her
with his hand on the window sill.

She looked up at him, at the face she knew, the face that (oddly, it
seemed to her) had not changed to suit her new conception of him, that
maintained its protest. She had loved everything about him, from the
dark, curling hair of his head to his well-finished feet; she had loved
his slender, virile body, and the clean red and brown of his face, the
strong jaw and the mouth that, hidden under the short moustache, she
divined only to be no less strong. More than these things she had loved
his eyes, the dark, bright dwelling-places of the "goodness" she had
loved best of all in him. Used to smiling as they looked at her, they
smiled even now.

"If you'll take my advice," he said, "you'll go back to your warm bed.
You shall have the whole place to yourself."

And with that he left her.

She rose, went to the bed, arranged the turned-back blanket so as to hide
the place where he had lain, and slid on to her knees, supporting herself
by the bedside.

Never before had Anne hurled herself into the heavenly places in
turbulence and disarray. It had been her wont to come, punctual to some
holy, foreappointed hour, with firm hands folded, with a back that, even
in bowing, preserved its pride; with meek eyes, close-lidded; with
breathing hushed for the calm passage of her prayer; herself marshalling
the procession of her dedicated thoughts, virgins all, veiled even before
their God.

Now she precipitated herself with clutching hands thrown out before her;
with hot eyes that drank the tears of their own passion; with the shamed
back and panting mouth of a Magdalen; with memories that scattered the
veiled procession of the Prayers. They fled before her, the Prayers, in a
gleaming tumult, a rout of heavenly wings that obscured her heaven. When
they had vanished a sudden vagueness came upon her.

And then it seemed that the storm that had gone over her had rolled her
mind out before her, like a sheet of white-hot iron. There was a record
on it, newly traced, of things that passion makes indiscernible under its
consuming and aspiring flame. Now, at the falling of the flam