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 embraced it," said she in her ringing voice. "I believe it's about the only thing you ever wanted to embrace." "You need not say so," she returned. "Then why, oh why, do you wear those awful clothes?" "My clothes are suitable," said she. "Suitable? My dear girl, they suggest a divorce-suit, Majendie _versus_ Majendie, if you like. You're a walking prosecution. Your face, with that expression on it, is a decree _nisi_ with costs. You don't want to be a libel on your husband, do you?" "How can you say such things?" "Well--look in the glass, dear, if you don't believe me." She looked. The dress was certainly not becoming. She greeted the joyless apparition with her thin, unwilling smile. He put his arm around her and drew her to him. He loved her dearly, for all her sadness and unsweetness. "Poor Nancy," he said, "I _am_ a brute. Forgive me." "I do forgive you." The words seemed the refrain of her life's sad song. And as he kissed her he said to himself, "That's all very well; but if I only knew what I'm supposed to have done to her! Her friends must think me a perfect monster."