With her heart beating violently and her breath painfully quickened, she proceeded down the stairs, through the hall, and so past the place where the stranger stood. When she reached him he became aware of her presence for the first time. Throwing back his head slightly with the action of one surprised, he met Anna’s eyes lifted with timid joy and dreamlike appeal to his face, and smiled, bending slightly as if in spiritual bestowment, and shedding into her heart the inexplicable delight which she had known before only as the effluence of a dream.
Neither spoke. The house door opened and closed, and Anna hastened down the street alone under the pale, clear sky, with a sense that the greatest event of her life had befallen her, but she knew not what it was. As she went on her homeward way she seemed to herself to be palpably taken up and borne onward by a power beyond herself, as of some rushing, mighty “wind of destiny.”
She found her husband at home, alone in the dusky library by an oppressive fire. She wanted to tell him what had happened; but when she sought to do this she found that nothing had happened; there was nothing to tell unless she should seek to put into words that mysterious dream of her past, and this she found impossible. The dream was her own. No one else could understand.
Keith had returned from a long and tiresome journey in her absence, and Anna was filled with penitence that she had not been in the house to receive him and make him comfortable. He looked worn and dispirited, and complained of the weather, which she had thought celestial, but which prostrated his strength.
In her quiet, skilful way she ministered to him, hiding in her heart the deep happiness in which no one could share, and as she bathed his head he caught her hand and kissed it.
“Oh, my wife,” he said, so low that she could hardly hear, “you are too beautiful, too wonderful for a miserable weakling of a man like me; but how I love you, Anna! Tell me that I do not spoil your life.”
CHAPTER XIX
I am holy while I stand
Circumcrossed by thy pure hand;
But when that is gone again,