," she said softly.

She saw that there were depths in this man that she had not suspected.
She had despised Lawson Hannay. She had detested him. She had thought him
coarse in grain, gross, unsufferably unspiritual. She had denied him any
existence in the world of desirable persons. She had refused to see any
good in him. She had wondered how Edith could tolerate him for an
instant. Now she knew.

She remembered that Edith was a proud woman, and that she had said that
her pride had had to go down in the dust before Lawson Hannay. And now
she, too, was humbled before him. He had beaten down all her pride. He
had been kind; but he had not spared her. He had not spared her; but the
gentlest woman could not have been more kind.

She rose and looked at him with a strange reverence and admiration.
"Whether he lives or dies," she said, "you will have given him back to
me."

She took up her third night's watch.

The nurse rose as she entered, gave her some directions, and went to her
own punctual sleep.

There was no change in the motionless body, in the drawn face, and in the
sightless eyes.

Anne sat by her husband's side and kept her hand upon his arm to feel the
life in it. She was consoled by contact, even while she told herself that
she had no right to touch him.

She knew what she had done to him. She had ruined him as surely as if she
had been a bad woman. He had loved her, and she had cast him from her,
and sent him to his sin. There was no humiliation and no pain that she
had spared him. Even the bad women sometimes spare. They have their pity
for the men they ruin; they have their poor, disastrous love. She had
been merciless where she owed most mercy.

Three people had tried to make her see it. Edith, who was a saint, and
that woman, who was a sinner; and Lawson Hannay. They had all taken the
same view of her. They had all told her the same thing.

She was a good woman, and her goodness had been her husband's ruin.

Of the three, Edith alone understood the true nature of the wrong she had
done him. The others had only seen one side of it, the material, tangible
side that weighed with them. Through her very goodness, she saw that that
was the least part of it; she knew that it had been the least part of it
with him.

Where she had wronged him most had been in the pitiless refusals of her
soul. And even there she had wronged him less by the things she had
refused to give than by the things that she had