watch. You'll begin by being most
awfully polite to each other."

"I suppose I may yet be permitted to call this strange young lady Anne?"

"Yes. That's because you remember that you _have_ known her once before,
a very long time ago, when you were children. You are children, both of
you. Oh, Walter, I believe you're looking forward to it; I believe you're
glad you've got to do it all over again."

"Yes, Edie, I positively believe I am."

He rose, laughing, prepared to begin that minute his new wooing of Anne.

"Good-bye," said Edith, "it _is_ good-bye, you know, and good luck to
you."

This time she knew that she had been wise for him.

Anne would have been horrified if she had known that the situation, so
terrible for her, was developing for her husband certain possibilities of
charm. His irrepressible boyishness refused to accept it in all its moral
gloom. There were, he perceived, advantages in these strained relations.
They had removed Anne into the mysterious realm her maidenhood had
inhabited, before marriage had had time to touch her magic. She had
become once more the unapproachable and unattained. Their first
courtship, pursued under intolerable restrictions of time and place, had
been a rather uninspired affair, and its end a foregone conclusion. He
had been afraid of himself, afraid sometimes of her. For he had not
brought her the spontaneous, unalarmed, unspoiled spirit of his youth.
He had come to her with a stain on his imagination and a wound in his
memory. And she was holy to him. He had held himself in, lest a touch,
a word, a gesture should recall some insufferable association.

Marriage had delivered him from the tyranny of reminiscence. No
reminiscence could stand before the force of passion in possession. It
purified; it destroyed; it built up in three days its own inviolable
memory.

And Anne, with the best will in the world, had had no power to undo its
work in him.

In herself, too, below her kindling spiritual consciousness, in the
unexplored depth and darkness of her, its work remained.

Majendie was unaware how far he had become another man and she another
woman. He was merely alive to the unusual and agreeable excitement of
wooing his own wife. There was a piquancy in the experiment that appealed
to him. Her new coldness called to him like a challenge. Her new
remoteness waked the adventurous youth in him. His imagination was
touched as it had not been touched before. He could s