“I don’t.  I—­It isn’t the land altogether.  It’s Colin.  I want him to get away from me for a time and do without me.  It’s frightfully important that he should get away.”

“We could send Colin to another part of the island with Eliot.  Only that wouldn’t be very kind to Eliot.”

“No.  It won’t do, Maisie.  I’ll go off somewhere when you’ve come back.”

“But that’s no good to us.  Jerrold will be here for the haying, if you’re thinking of that.”

“I’m not thinking of that.  I’m thinking of Colin.”

As she said it she knew that she was lying.  Lying to Maisie.  Lying for the first time.  That came of knowing Maisie; it came of Maisie’s sweetness.  She would have to lie and lie.  She was not thinking of Colin now; she was thinking that if Jerrold came back for the hay harvest and Maisie went on with Colin to the Italian Lakes, she would have her lover to herself; they would be alone together all June.  She would lie in his arms, not for their short, reckless hour of Sunday, but night after night, from long before midnight till the dawn.

For last year, when the warm weather came, Anne and Colin had slept out of doors in wooden shelters set up in the Manor fields, away from the noises of the farm.  A low stone wall separated Anne’s field from Colin’s.  This year, when Jerrold came home, Colin’s shelter had been moved up from the field to the Manor garden.  In the summer Anne would sleep again in her shelter.  The path to her field from the Manor garden lay through three pastures and two strips of fir plantation with a green drive between.

Jerrold would come to her there.  He would have his bed in Colin’s shelter in the garden, and when the night was quiet he would get up and go down the Manor fields and through the fir plantation to her shelter at the bottom.  They would lie there in each other’s arms, utterly safe, hidden from passing feet and listening ears, and eyes that watched behind window panes.

And as she thought of his coming to her, and heard her own voice lying to Maisie, the blood mounted to her face, flooding it to the roots of her hair.

“I’m thinking of Colin.”

Her voice kept on sounding loud and dreadful in her brain, while Maisie’s voice floated across it, faint, as if it came from somewhere a long way off.

“You never think of yourself.  You’re too good for anything, Anne.”

She would never be safe from Maisie and Maisie’s innocence that accused, reproached and threatened her.  Maisie’s sweetness went through her like a thrusting sword, like a sharp poison; it had words that cut deeper than threats, reproaches, accusations.  Before she had seen Maisie she had been fearless, pitiless, remorseless; now, because of Maisie, she would never be safe from remorse and pity and fear.

She recovered.  She told herself that she hadn’t lied; that she had been thinking of Colin; that she had thought of him first; that she had refused to go to Taormina before she knew that Jerrold was coming back for the hay harvest.  She couldn’t help it if she knew that now.  It was not as if she had schemed for it or counted on it.  She had never for one moment counted on anything or schemed.  And still, as she thought of Jerrold, her heart tightened on the sharp sword-thrust of remorse.