"I couldn't help it. You looked so pretty, dear, and so forlorn. It
seemed brutal, somehow, to abandon you on the weary road to heaven."

She sighed. That was his chivalry again. He would escort her politely to
the door of heaven, but would he ever go in with her, would he ever stay
there?

Still, it was something that he should have gone with her so far. It gave
her confidence and an idea of what her power might come to be. Not that
she relied upon herself alone. Her plan for Majendie's salvation was
liberal and large, it admitted of other methods, other influences. There
was no narrowness, any more than there was jealousy, in Anne.

"Walter," said she, "I want you to know Mrs. Eliott."

"But I do know her, don't I?"

He called up a vision of the lady whose house had been Anne's home in
Scale. He was grateful to Mrs. Eliott. But for her slender acquaintance
with his sister, he would never have known Anne. This made him feel that
he knew Mrs. Eliott.

"But I want you to know her as I know her."

He laughed. "Is that possible? Does a man ever know a woman as another
woman knows her?"

Anne felt that she was not only being diverted from her purpose, but led
by a side tract to an unexplored profundity. On the further side of it
she discerned, dimly, the undesirable. It was a murky region, haunted