r him."

The name called up no colour to her cheek. Maggie had forgotten Gorst,
and all _he_ had done for her.

"And you're paying me back."

She shook her head. "I can't ever pay you back."

Poor little girl! Was that what her mind was always running on?

There was silence again between them. And then Majendie looked at Maggie.

She was sitting very still, as if she were waiting for something, and yet
content. Her eyes were swimming, as if with tears; but there were no
tears in them. Her face was reddening, as if with shame, but there was no
shame in it. She seemed to be listening, dazed and enchanted, to her own
secret, the running whisper of her blood. Her lips were parted, and, as
he looked at her, they closed and opened again in sympathy with the
delicate tremors that moved her throat under her rounded chin. In her
brooding look there was neither reminiscence nor foreboding; it was the
look of a creature surrendered wholly to her hour.

As he looked at her his nerves sent an arrow of warning, a hot tremor
darting from heart to brain.

"I must go now, Maggie," he said.

When he stood up, his knees shook under him.

"Not yet," said Maggie. "I'm all alone in the house, and I'm afraid."

"There's nothing to be afraid of," he said roughly. "I've got to go."

He strode towards the door while Maggie stared after him in terror. She
understood nothing but that he was going to leave her. What had she done
to drive him away?

"You're ill," she cried, as she followed him, panting in her fright.

He pushed her back gently from the threshold.

"Don't be a little fool, Maggie. I'm not ill."

Out in the street, five yards from Maggie's door, he battled with a
vision of her that almost drove him back again. "It was I who was a
fool," he thought. "I shall go back. Why not? She is predestined. Why not
I as well as anybody else?"

All the way to his own door an insistent, abominable voice kept calling
to him, "Why not? Why not?"

He went with noiseless footsteps up his own stairs, past the dark doors
below, past Edith's open door where the lamp still burned brightly beyond
the threshold. At Anne's door he paused.

It stood ajar in a dim light. He pushed it softly open and went in.

Anne and her child lay asleep under the silver crucifix.

Peggy had been taken into Anne's bed, and had curled herself close up
against her mother's side. Her arm lay on Anne's breast; one hand
clutched the border of Anne's nightgow