He pressed her to his breast, and kissed her and blessed her; and as the March afternoon began to wane they descended the ruinous stone stairs of the old tower slowly together, she with her hands to his shoulders following him step by step silently, but not unhappily. There was hope in her husband’s heart, and it had affected her a little. The mellow sounds of the organ were pealing through the church where the organist was practicing as, at the bottom stair, Harry gave his wife a last passionate kiss before they left the shadowy building for the outer air. And the next day Annie started for London. CHAPTER XX. The journey back to London was a very strange one to Annie; she never saw the landscape through which the train passed, she did not even remember the faces of her fellow-passengers afterward. Her mind was filled with fears for the future--for her own, for her husband’s, for Lilian’s, for George’s, for that of all the family at the Grange, and for Aubrey’s. She did hate him deeply, this man who had cheated her into making her look upon him as the most gentle, most courteous, brightest of companions and the most devoted of friends, when he was really nothing but a volatile, unprincipled flirt, who made love indifferently to her, or to a coarse woman like Miss West, or to a little giddy creature like the girl to whom Miss Taylor had said he was engaged. Perhaps Annie hardly dwelt enough, in her blame of Aubrey, on the question whether she herself had done right in concealing from him the fact that she was married, and whether, even supposing she had been free, as he imagined her to be, he would not have been justified in thinking no more of a lady who had dismissed him and disappeared without a word, and in transferring his attentions to women who would appreciate them more highly. But with all her blame was mingled sincere anxiety for him, and unselfish sorrow that he should have fallen into bad hands. As for her own husband, she felt more kindly toward him now that she was away from the daily irritation of his presence, from the fear of his trivial jealousy, of his impossible demands. Their impossibility she could not question. She felt that she could never return, with the ardor which alone would content him, the passionate love she had inspired in a nature so different from her own, and, as it seemed to her, so antagonistic to it. The most that she could hope for was that, if his affection should indeed remain warm until next Christmas, when she had promised to return to him, the nine months of hard work upon the stage which she was about to commence would have wearied her into the semblance of contentment with a life so distasteful to her active mind as permanent idleness at the Grange with her uncongenial husband would be.