atisfied her heart completely; that she
fulfilled herself in it as she never could have fulfilled herself in any
other way. Nothing could degrade or spoil the spiritual beauty of this
relation. It served as a standard by which she could better judge her
relation to her husband. "I love her more than I ever loved him," she
thought. "I cannot help it. If it had been possible to love him as I love
her--but I have lowered myself by loving him. I will raise myself by
loving her."

She was never tired of being with Edith, sewing silently by her fireside,
or reading aloud to her (for Edith's hands were too tremulous now to hold
a book), or sitting close up against her couch, nursing her hands in
hers, as if she would have given them her own strength.

And thus her ardour spent and renewed itself, and left her colder than
ever to her husband.

At times she mourned, obscurely, the destruction of the new soul that had
been given her last year, on her birthday, when she had been born again
to her sweet human destiny. At times she had glimpses of the perfect
thing it might have been. There was no logical sequence in the events
that had destroyed it, the return of Lady Cayley and the spectacle of
her triumph. She could not say that her husband had deteriorated in
consequence. The change was in herself, and not in him. He was what he
always had been; only she seemed to see him more completely now. At
times, when the high spiritual life died down in sleep, she slipped from
her trouble, and turned, with her arms stretched towards him, where he
lay. In her dreams he came to her with the low cry she had heard in the
wood at Westleydale. And in her dreams she was tender; but her waking
thoughts were sad and hard.

Majendie found it more than ever difficult to realise that she had ever
shown him kindness, that her arms had opened to him and her pulses beaten
with his own. Her face and her body were changing with this change of
soul. Her health suffered. Her eyes became dull, her skin dry; her small,
reticent mouth had taken on the tragic droop; she was growing austerely
thin. She had abandoned the pleasing and worldly fashion of her dress,
and arrayed herself now in straight-cut, sombre garments, very
serviceable in the sick-room, but mournfully suggestive, to her husband's
fancy, of her renunciation of the will to please.

On her first appearance in this garb he enquired whether she had embraced
the religious life.

"I always have