V

With the departure of Sanderson the significance of the curious incidents waned, because the moods that had produced them passed away.  Mrs. Bittacy soon afterwards came to regard them as some growth of disproportion that had been very largely, perhaps, in her own mind.  It did not strike her that this change was sudden for it came about quite naturally.  For one thing her husband never spoke of the matter, and for another she remembered how many things in life that had seemed inexplicable and singular at the time turned out later to have been quite commonplace.

Most of it, certainly, she put down to the presence of the artist and to his wild, suggestive talk.  With his welcome removal, the world turned ordinary again and safe.  The fever, though it lasted as usual a short time only, had not allowed of her husband’s getting up to say good-bye, and she had conveyed his regrets and adieux.  In the morning Mr. Sanderson had seemed ordinary enough.  In his town hat and gloves, as she saw him go, he seemed tame and unalarming.

“After all,” she thought as she watched the pony-cart bear him off, “he’s only an artist!” What she had thought he might be otherwise her slim imagination did not venture to disclose.  Her change of feeling was wholesome and refreshing.  She felt a little ashamed of her behavior.  She gave him a smile—­genuine because the relief she felt was genuine—­as he bent over her hand and kissed it, but she did not suggest a second visit, and her husband, she noted with satisfaction and relief, had said nothing either.

The little household fell again into the normal and sleepy routine to which it was accustomed.  The name of Arthur Sanderson was rarely if ever mentioned.  Nor, for her part, did she mention to her husband the incident of his walking in his sleep and the wild words he used.  But to forget it was equally impossible.  Thus it lay buried deep within her like a center of some unknown disease of which it was a mysterious symptom, waiting to spread at the first favorable opportunity.  She prayed against it every night and morning:  prayed that she might forget it—­that God would keep her husband safe from harm.

For in spite of much surface foolishness that many might have read as weakness.  Mrs. Bittacy had balance, sanity, and a fine deep faith.  She was greater than she knew.  Her love for her husband and her God were somehow one, an achievement only possible to a single-hearted nobility of soul.

There followed a summer of great violence and beauty; of beauty, because the refreshing rains at night prolonged the glory of the spring and spread it all across July, keeping the foliage young and sweet; of violence, because the winds that tore about the south of England brushed the whole country into dancing movement.  They swept the woods magnificently, and kept them roaring with a perpetual grand voice.  Their deepest notes seemed never to leave the sky.  They sang