ssed him like a
furious devil. It was sleeping in him now, biding its time, ready, she
knew, to be roused by the first touch of a _crescendo_. The _crescendo_
came.

"Christian! Up and fight them!"

The voice waked; it leaped from him; and to Anne's terrified nerves it
seemed to be scattering the voices of the choir before it. It dropped on
the Amen and died; but in dying it remained triumphant, like the trump of
an archangel retreating to the uttermost ends of heaven.

Anne's heart pained her with a profane tenderness, and a poignant
repudiation. Her soul being once more adjusted to the divine, it was
intolerable to think that this preposterous human voice should have power
to shake it so.

She sank to her knees and bowed her head to the Benediction.

"Did you like it?" he asked as they emerged together into the open air.

He spoke as if to the child she seemed to him now to be. They had been
playing together, pretending they were two pilgrims bound for the
Heavenly City, and he wanted to know if she had had a nice game. He
nursed the exquisite illusion that this time he had pleased her by
playing too.

"Of course I liked it."

"So did I," he answered joyously, "I quite enjoyed it. We'll do it again
some other night."

"What made you come, like that?" said she, appeased by his innocence.

"I couldn't help it. You looked so pretty, dear, and so forlorn. It
seemed brutal, somehow, to abandon you on the weary road to heaven."

She sighed. That was his chivalry again. He would escort her politely to
the door of heaven, but would he ever go in with her, would he ever stay
there?

Still, it was something that he should have gone with her so far. It gave
her confidence and an idea of what her power might come to be. Not that
she relied upon herself alone. Her plan for Majendie's salvation was
liberal and large, it admitted of other methods, other influences. There
was no narrowness, any more than there was jealousy, in Anne.

"Walter," said she, "I want you to know Mrs. Eliott."

"But I do know her, don't I?"

He called up a vision of the lady whose house had been Anne's home in
Scale. He was grateful to Mrs. Eliott. But for her slender acquaintance
with his sister, he would never have known Anne. This made him feel that
he knew Mrs. Eliott.

"But I want you to know her as I know her."

He laughed. "Is that possible? Does a man ever know a woman as another
woman knows her?"

Anne felt that she wa