Edith, watching for the propitious moment, could not tell by what signs she would recognise it when it came.  Her own hour was the early evening.  She had always brightened towards six o’clock, the time of her brother’s home-coming.

To-day he had removed himself, to give her her chance with Anne.  She could see him pottering about the garden below her window.  He had kept that garden with care.  He had mown and sown, and planted, and weeded, and watered it, that Edith might always have something pretty to look at from her window.  With its green grass plot and gay beds, the tiny oblong space defied the extending grime and gloom of Scale.  This year he had planted it for Anne.  He had set a thousand bulbs for her, and many thousand flowers were to have sprung up in time to welcome her.  But something had gone wrong with them.  They had suffered by his absence.  As Edith looked out of the window he was stooping low, on acutely bended knees, sorrowfully preoccupied with a broken hyacinth.  He had his back to them.

To Edith’s mind there was something heart-rending in the expression of that intent, innocent back, so surrendered to their gaze, so unconscious of its own pathetic curve.  She wondered if it appealed to Anne in that way.  She judged from the expression of her sister-in-law’s face that it did not appeal to her in any way at all.

“Poor dear,” said she, “he’s still worrying about those blessed bulbs of mine—­of yours, I mean.”

“Don’t, Edie.  As if I wanted to take your bulbs away from you.  I’m not jealous.”

“No more am I,” said Edie.  “Let’s say both our bulbs.  I wish he wouldn’t garden quite so much, though.  It always makes his head ache.”

“Why does he do it, then?” asked Anne calmly.

Her calmness irritated Edith.

“Oh, why does Walter do anything?  Because he’s an angel!”

Anne’s silence gave her the opening she was looking for.

“You know, you used to think so, too.”

“Of course I did,” said Anne evasively.

“And equally of course, you don’t, now you’ve married him?”

“I have married him.  What more could I do to prove my appreciation?”

“Oh, heaps more.  Mere marrying’s nothing.  Any woman can do that.”

“Do you think so?  It seems to me that marrying—­mere marrying—­may be a great deal—­about as much as many men have a right to ask.”

“Hasn’t every man a right to ask for—­what shall I say—­a little understanding—­from the woman he cares for?”

“Edith, what has he told you?”

“Nothing, my dear, that I hadn’t seen for myself.”

“Did he tell you that I ‘misunderstood’ him?”

“Did he pose as l’homme incompris?  No, he didn’t.”

“Still—­he told you,” Anne insisted.

“Of course he did.”  She brushed the self-evident aside and returned to her point.  “He does care for you.  That, at least, you can understand.”