ng of the
soul in the beatific self-surrender. But Anne's sufferings had brought
her a little further on her path. She had come to recognise that supine
state as a great danger to the spiritual life. It was not by lassitude,
but by concentration that the intense communion was attained. She lifted
her bowed head as a sign of her exaltation.

And as she lifted it, she caught, as it were, the approach of triumphal
music. Words gathered, as on wings, from the clean-swept heavenly
spaces--they went by her like the passing of an immense processional:
"Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting
doors, and the King of Glory shall come in...." It came on, that heavenly
invasion, and all her earthly barriers went down before it. And it was as
if something strong in her, something solitary and pure, had cloven its
way through the mesh of the throbbing nerves, through the beating
currents of the blood, through the hot red lights of the brain, and had
escaped into the peaceful blank. She remained there a moment, in the
place of bliss, the divine place of the self-surrendered soul, where
mortal emptiness draws down immortality.

She said to herself, "I have my refuge; no one can take it from me.
Nothing matters so long as I can get there."

She rose from her knees more calm and self-contained than ever, barely
conscious of her wound.

So calm and so self-contained was she at dinner that Majendie had an
agreeable rebound; he supposed that she had recovered from the abominable
encounter, and had put Lady Cayley out of her head like a sensible woman.
Edith had received his account of that incident with a gravity that had
made him profoundly uncomfortable; and his relief was in proportion to
his embarrassment. Unfortunately it gave him the appearance of
complacency; and complacency in the circumstances was more than Anne
could bear. Coming straight from her exaltation and communion, she was
crushed by the profound, invisible difference that separated them, the
perpetual loneliness of her unwedded, unsubjugated soul. They lived a
whole earth and a whole heaven apart. He was untouched by the fires that
burnt and purified her. The tragic crises that destroyed, the spiritual
moments that built her up again, passed by him unperceived. If she were
to tell him how she had attained her present serenity of mind, by what
vision, by what effort, by what sundering of body and soul, he would not
understand.

And that wa