Edith was not only angelic, but womanly and full of guile, and she knew with whom she had to do. She had humbled Anne with shrewd shafts that hit her in all her weak places; now she exalted her. Anne had not her likeness in a thousand. She was a woman magnificently planned, of stature not to be diminished by the highest pedestal. A figure fit for a throne, a niche, a shrine. Edith could see the dear little downy feathers sprouting on Anne's shoulder-blades, and the infant aureole playing in her hair. "You're a saint," said Edith. "I am not," said Anne, while her pale cheek glowed with the flattery. "Of course you are," said Edith, "or you could never have put up with me." Whereupon Anne kissed her. "And I may tell Walter what you've said?" It was thus that she spared Anne's mortal pride. She knew how it would shrink from telling him. Anne went down to Majendie in the garden and sent him to his sister. They returned to the house by the open window of his study. A bright fire was burning in the room. He looked at her shyly and half in doubt, drew up an arm-chair to the hearth, and left her there. His manner brought back to her the days of their engagement when that room had been their refuge. Not that they had often been alone together. She could count the times on the fingers of one hand, the times when Edith was too ill to be wheeled into her room. It had been nearly always in Edith's room that she had seen him, surrounded by all the feminine devices, the tender trivialities that were part of the moving pathos of the scene. She had so associated him with his sister that it had been hard for her to realise that he had any separate life of his own. She felt that his love for her had simply grown out of his love for Edith, it was the flame, the flower of his tenderness. It was one with his goodness, and she had been glad to have it so. There was no jealousy in Anne. It came over her now with a fresh shock, how very little, after all, she had known of him. It was through Edith that she really knew him. And yet it was impossible that Edith could have absorbed him utterly. Anne had not counted his business; for it had not interested her, and to say that Walter was a ship-owner did not define him in the very least. What remained over of Walter was a secret that this room, his study, must partially reveal.