e, to forget. "I am going to try to forget it, as I
have forgotten it before. But it will be very hard, and you must be
patient with me. You must not remind me of it more than you can help."

"When have I--?"

She was silent.

"When?" he insisted.

She shook her head and turned away. A sudden impulse roused him, and he
sprang after her. He grasped her wrist as she laid her hand on the door
to open it. He drew her to him. "When?" he repeated. "How? Tell me."

She paused, gazing at him. He would have kissed her, hoping thus to make
his peace with her; but she broke from him.

"Ah," she cried, "you are reminding me of it now."

He opened the door, dumb with amazement, and turned from her as she went
through.

CHAPTER XIV

It was a fine day, early in November, and Anne was walking alone along
one of the broad flat avenues that lead from Scale into the country
beyond. Made restless by her trouble, she had acquired this pedestrian
habit lately, and Majendie encouraged her in it, regarding it less as a
symptom than as a cure. She had flagged a little in the autumn, and he
was afraid that the strain of her devotion to Edith was beginning to tell
upon her health. On Saturdays and Sundays they generally walked together,
and he did his best to make his companionship desirable. Anne, given now
to much self-questioning as to their relations, owned, in an access of
justice, that she enjoyed these expeditions. Whatever else she had found
her husband, she had never yet found him dull. But it did not occur to
her, any more than it occurred to Majendie, to consider whether she
herself were brilliant.

She made a point of never refusing him her society. She had persuaded
herself that she went with him for his own good. If he wanted to take
long walks in the country, it was her duty as his wife to accompany him.
She was sustained perpetually by her consciousness of doing her duty as
his wife; and she had persuaded herself also that she found her peace in
it. She kept his hours for him as punctually as ever; she aimed more
than ever at perfection in her household ways. He should never be able
to say that there was one thing in which she had failed him.

No; she knew that neither he nor Edith, if they tried, could put their
finger on any point, and say: There, or there, she had gone wrong. Not
in her understanding of him. She told herself that she understood him
completely now, to her own great unhappiness. The unhappine