through their three days' association with her happy bridals. Now the
room and everything in it seemed to have been created for all time to be
the accomplices and ministers of her degradation. They were well
acquainted with her and it; they held foreknowledge of her, as the
pier-glass held her dishonoured and dishevelled image.

She thought of her dead father's house, the ivy-coated Deanery in the
south, and of the small white bedroom, a girl's bedroom that had once
known her and would never know her again. She thought of her father and
mother, and was glad that they were dead. Once she wondered why their
death had been God's will. Now she saw very clearly why. But why she
herself should have been sent upon this road, of all roads of suffering,
was more than Anne could see.

She, whose nature revolted against the despotically human, had schooled
herself into submission to the divine. Her sense of being supremely
guided and protected had, before now, enabled her to act with decision
in turbulent and uncertain situations of another sort. Where other people
writhed or vacillated, Anne had held on her course, uplifted,
unimpassioned, and resigned. Now she was driven hither and thither,
she sank to the very dust and turned in it, she saw no way before her,
neither her own way nor God's way.

Widowhood would not have left her so abject and so helpless. If her
husband's body had lain dead before her there, she could have stood
beside it, and declared herself consoled by the immortal presence of his
spirit. But to attend this deathbed of her belief and of her love, love
that had already given itself over, too weak to struggle against
dissolution, it was as if she had seen some horrible reversal of the
law of death, spirit returning to earth, the incorruptible putting on