He still waited. Then he conceived a happy idea. He would try to make her laugh.
"Just because I said she'd had a little son?"
Her tears fell to answer him.
She gathered herself together with a supreme effort, and steadied her lips to speak. "Please leave me. I came here to be alone."
A light broke in on him, and he left her.
He shut himself up in the dining-room with his light. He had pushed his breakfast aside, too preoccupied to eat it.
"So that's it?" he said to himself. "That's it. Poor Nancy. That's what she's wanted all the time. What a fool I was never to have thought of it."
He breathed with an immense relief. He had solved the enigma of Anne with all her "funniness." It was not that she had turned against him, nor against her destiny. She had been disappointed of her destiny, that was all. It was enough. She must have been fretting for months, poor darling, and just when she could bear it no longer, Mrs. Gardner, he supposed, had come as the last straw. No wonder that she had said he was unkind.
And in that hour of his enlightenment a great chastening fell upon Majendie. He told himself that he must be as gentle with her as he knew how; gentler than he had ever yet known how. And his heart smote him as he thought how he had hurt her, how he might hurt her again unknowingly, and how the tenderness of the tenderest male was brutality when applied to these wonderful, pitiful, incomprehensible things that women were. He accepted the misery of the last three months as a fit punishment for his lack of understanding.
His light brought a great longing to him and a great hope. From that moment he watched her anxiously. He had never realised till now, after three months of misery, quite what she meant to him, how sacred and dear she was, and how much he loved her.