It did not take Christopher long to decide that Ridgeley was no longer
in love with his wife. "Of course he would call it love. But he could
live just as well without her. He has made a machine of himself."
He spoke to Dunbar one night about Anne. "Do you think she is perfectly
well?"
"Why not?"
"There's a touch of breathlessness when we walk. Are you sure about her
heart?"
"She has never been strong--" and that had seemed to be the end of it.
But it was not the end of it for Christopher. He watched Anne closely,
and once when they climbed a hill together and she gave out, he carried
her to the top. He managed to get his ear against her heart, and what he
heard drained the blood from his face.
As for Anne, she thought how strong he was--and how fair his hair was
with the sun upon it, for he had tucked his cap in his pocket.
That night Christopher again spoke to Ridgeley. "Anne's in a bad way."
He told of the walk to the top of the hill.
Ridgeley listened this time, and the next day he took Anne down into his
office, and did things to her. "But I don't see why you are doing all
this," she complained, as he stuck queer instruments in his ears, and
made her draw long breaths while he listened.
"Christopher says you get tired when you walk."
"Well, I do. But there's nothing really the matter, is there?"
There was a great deal the matter, but there was no hint of it in his
manner. If she had not been his wife, he would probably have told her
the truth--that she had a few months, perhaps a few years ahead of her.
He was apt to be frank with his patients. But he was not frank with
Anne. He had intended to tell Christopher at once. But Christopher was
away for a week.
In the week that he was separated from her, Christopher learned that he
loved Anne; that he had been in love with her from the moment that she
had stood among the birches--like one of them in her white
slenderness--and had talked to him of guardian angels;--"_Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John_!"
He did not believe in saints, nor in the angels whose wings seemed to
enfold Anne, but he believed in beauty--and Anne's seemed lighted from
within, like an alabaster lamp.
Yet she was very human--and the girl in her and the boy in him had met
in the weeks that he had spent with her. They had found a lot of things
to do--they had fished in shallow brown streams, they had ridden
through miles of lovely country. They had gone forth in search of
adventure, and they had found it; in cherries on a tree by the road, and
he had climbed the tree and had dropped them down to her, and she had
hung them over her ears--He had milked a cow in a pasture as they
passed, and they had drunk it with their sandwiches, and had tied up a
bill in Anne's fine handkerchief and had knotted it to the halter of the
gentle, golden-eared Guernsey.
But they had found more than adventure--they had found romance--shining
upon them everywhere. "If I were a gipsy to follow the road, and she
could follow it with me," Christopher meditated as he sat in the train
on his way back to Anne.
But there was Anne's husband, and Christopher's friend--and more than
all there were all the specters of modern life--all the hideous wheels
which must turn if Anne were ever to be his--treachery to Ridgeley--the
divorce court--and then, himself and Anne, living the aftermath, of it
all, facing, perhaps, disillusion--
"Oh, not _that_," Christopher told himself, "she'd never grow
less--never anything less than she is--if she could once--care--"
For he did not know whether Anne cared or not. He might guess as he
pleased--but there had not been a word between them.