"You would have saved him."

Anne saw herself for one moment as his guardian angel, her mission
frustrated through a flaw of time. That vision was dashed by another,
herself as the ideal, the star he should have looked to before its dawn,
herself dishonoured by his young haste, his passion, his failure to
foresee.

"He should have waited for me."

"Did you wait for him?"

A quick flush pulsed through the whiteness of Anne's face. She looked
back seven years to her girlhood in the southern Deanery, her home. She
had another vision, a vision of a Minor Canon, whom she had loved with
the pure worship of her youth, a love of which somehow she was now
ashamed. Ashamed, though it had then seemed to her so spiritual. Her dead
parents had desired the marriage, but neither she nor they had the power
to bring it about.

Edith had never heard of the Minor Canon. She had drawn a bow at a
venture.

"My dear," she said, "why not? It's only the very elect lovers who can
say to each other, 'I never loved any one but you.'"

"At any rate," said Anne, "I never loved any one else well enough to
marry him."

For, in her fancy, the Minor Canon, being withdrawn in time, had ceased