"I will not start managing him. It gets nowhere and does no good." Anne's logic always led her to this point, where, by an extra effort, she usually succeeded in leaving it for the time.
And then, two weeks before Christmas, something happened that drove all other thoughts from Anne's mind. She was going to have a child. She knew it now beyond a doubt. The vague fears and tenuous analyses of the last weeks vanished.
"It's what mamma would call 'my condition,' I suppose."
The world had changed, suddenly, and Anne's relation to it and to herself had changed. Everything seemed bigger, wider and full of soft mystery. The universe, a great, shadowy stretch far beyond her or her immediate concerns, now centered in herself. She was the center of something beyond ordinary life, beyond any small, blind struggle of mistaken millions, almost beyond the law that governed the daily comings and goings of mere humanity. No mystic ever felt nearer to bodies unseen, heard far voices more clearly, than did Anne in the first days of her sureness; when, her secret guarded for the perfect moment of revelation, she sat hour after hour, looking out across the tangled garden to the Bay, to old Tamalpais, quiet, eternal, understanding.
The Wednesday before Christmas the weather turned. The long period of sunshine was blotted by the first rain. All day it fell, soaking the garden and shutting Anne from the world behind a thick, soft curtain. Roger came early that night, less troubled than he had seemed of late, and after dinner sat reading before the fire, instead of staring into it as he had done so often since the Sabatini case. She felt small and happy and understanding, shut within the warm peace of her home by the pouring rain, very near to the man sitting so close beside her. She would tell him now. When he closed his book she slipped her hand into his and then, leaving her chair, curled up in his lap.
Roger's arms held her gently, and he leaned his cheek against her hair. Anne waited, a little disappointed that he did not sense instantly the secret just behind her lips. Surely if Roger had had anything so vital to tell her, she would have known it. But he only stroked her hair and now that she was listening with every nerve in her for a key to Roger's mood, she felt that he was really far away. He was thinking of something that had nothing whatever to do with her, while she felt so strangely, almost terribly, one with him. She sat up.
"What is it, Princess?" Roger drew his attention from some distant point. "Aren't you comfy?"
"How do you know it was anything? You were miles away."
"I guess I was. Not so far, however, not farther than the office."
Anne frowned. "Has Hilary Wainwright come to live permanently in the house with us? It was really much nicer when we were alone."