“He’d have found it himself all right without me.”

“I’m not so sure.  We were awfully worried about him after the war.  He was all at a loose end without anything to do.  And dreadfully restless.  We thought he’d never settle to anything again.  And I was afraid he’d want to live in London.”

“I don’t think he’d ever do that.”

“He won’t now.  But, you see, he used to be afraid of this place.”

“I know.  After his father’s death.”

“And he simply loves it now.  I think it’s because he’s seen what you’ve done with it.  I know he hadn’t the smallest idea of farming it before.  It’s what he ought to have been doing all his life.  And when you think how seedy he was when he came down here, and how fit he is now.”

“I think,” Anne said, “I’d better be going.”

Maisie’s innocence was more than she could bear.

“Jerry’ll see you home.  And you’ll come again, won’t you?  Soon....  Will you take them?  I gathered them for you.”

“Thanks.  Thanks awfully.”  Anne’s voice came with a jerk.  Her breath choked her.

Jerrold was coming down the garden walk, looking for her.  She said good-bye to Maisie and turned to go with him home.

“Well,” he said, “how did you and Maisie get on?”

“It was exactly what I thought it would be, only worse.”

He laughed.  “Worse?”

“I mean she was sweeter....  Jerrold, she makes me feel such a brute.  Such an awful brute.  And if she ever knows—­”

“She won’t know.”

When he had left her Anne flung herself down on the couch and cried.

All evening Maisie’s tulips stood up in the blue-and-white Chinese bowl on the table.  They had childlike, innocent faces that reproached her.  Nothing would ever be the same again.

XV

ANNE, JERROLD, AND MAISIE

i

It was a Sunday in the middle of April.

Jerrold had motored up to London on the Friday and had brought Eliot back with him for the week-end.  Anne had come over as she always did on a Sunday afternoon.  She and Maisie were sitting out on the terrace when Eliot came to them, walking with the tired limp that Anne found piteous and adorable.  Very soon Maisie murmured some gentle, unintelligible excuse, and left them.

There was a moment of silence in which everything they had ever said to each other was present to them, making all other speech unnecessary, as if they held a long intimate conversation.  Eliot sat very still, not looking at her, yet attentive as if he listened to the passing of those unuttered words.  Then Anne spoke and her voice broke up his mood.

“What are you doing now?  Bacteriology?”

“Yes.  We’ve found the thing we were looking for, the germ of trench fever.”

“You mean you have.”

“Well, somebody would have spotted it if I hadn’t.  A lot of us were out for it.”