unimportant matters, reserving his energies for supremely decisive
moments.

Anne, bearing her belief in Majendie in her innocent breast, failed at
first to connect her husband with the remarkable intimations that passed
between the two newcomers gossiping in the drawing-room before dinner.
They, for their part, had no clue linking the unapproachably strange lady
on the neighbouring sofa with the hero of their tale. The case, they
said, was "infamous." At that point Majendie had put an end to his own
history and his wife's uncertainty by entering the room. Three words and
a look, observed by Anne, had established his identity.

Her mind was steadied by its inalienable possession of the facts. She had
returned through prayer to her normal mood of religious resignation. She
tried to support herself further by a chain of reasoning. If all things
were divinely ordered, this sorrow also was the will of God. It was the
burden she was appointed to take up and bear.

She bathed and dressed herself for the day. She felt so strange
to herself in these familiar processes that, standing before the
looking-glass, she was curious to observe what manner of woman she had
become. The inner upheaval had been so profound that she was surprised
to find so little record of it in her outward seeming.

Anne was a woman whose beauty was a thing of general effect, and the
general effect remained uninjured. Nature had bestowed on her a body
strongly made and superbly fashioned. Having framed her well, she
coloured her but faintly. She had given her eyes of a light thick grey.
Her eyebrows, her lashes, and her hair were of a pale gold that had ashen
undershades in it. They all but matched a skin honey-white with that