The wonder is that it should be born at all.
To-day, the day of their return, the March wind had swept the streets clean, and the evening had secret gold and sharp silver in its grey.

Anne remembered how, only last year, she had looked upon such a spring on the day when she guessed for the first time that Walter cared for her.

She was not highly endowed with imagination; still, even she had felt dimly, and for once in her life, that sense of mortal tenderness and divine uplifting which is the message of Spring to all lovers.
But that emotion, which had had its momentary intensity for Anne Fletcher, was over and done with for Anne Majendie.

Like some mourner for whom superb weather has been provided on the funeral day of his beloved, she felt in this young, wantoning, unsympathetic Spring the immortal cruelty and irony of Nature.

She was bearing her own heart to its burial; and each street that they passed, as the slow cab rattled heavily on its way from the station, was a stage in the intolerable progress; it brought her a little nearer to the grave.
From her companion's respectful silence she gathered that, though lost to the extreme funereal significance of their journey, he was not indifferent; he shared to some extent her mourning mood.