breath rose and fell in unison with the heaving chant. He watched her
with a certain reverence, incomprehensibly chastened, till the door
opened, and she went from him, moving down the lighted aisle with her
remote, renunciating air.

The door was shut in Majendie's face, and he turned away, intending to
kill, to murder the next hour at his club.

Anne was self-trained in the habit of detachment. She had only to kneel,
to close her eyes and cover her face, and her soul slid of its own accord
into the place of peace. Her very breathing and the beating of her heart
were stayed. Her mind, emptied in a moment, was in a moment filled,
brimming over with the thought of God. To her veiled vision that thought
was like a sheet of blank light let down behind her drooped eyelids, and
centring in a luminous whorl. It fascinated her. Her prayer shot straight
to the heart of it, a communion too swift to trouble or divide the
blessed light.

In that instant her husband, the image and the thought of him, were cast
into the secular darkness.

She remembered how difficult it had once been thus to renounce him.
Her trouble, in the days of her engagement, had been that, thrust him
from her as she would, the idea of his goodness--the goodness that
justified her through its own appeal--would call up his presence,
emerging radiant from the outermost abyss. Inferior emotions then mingled
indistinguishably with her holiest ardours. Spiritually ambitious, she
had had her young eye on a hard-won crown of glory, and she had found
that happiness made the spiritual life almost contemptibly easy. It was
no effort in those days to realise divine mysteries, when the miracle of