“And then, on the top of it all, I remembered you, Anne, and all your goodness and sweetness.  I got right away from my beastly self and saw you as you are.  And I knew what you’d done for me.  I don’t believe I ever knew, really knew, before.  I had to be alone with myself before I could see it, just as I always had to be alone with my music before I could get it right.  I’ve never thanked you properly.  I can’t thank you.  There aren’t any words to do it in.  And I only know now what it’s cost you....”

Did he know?  Did he know that it had once cost her Jerrold?

“...  For instance, I know you gave up coming here with us because you thought it would be better for me without you.”

Colin, too, turning it in her heart, the sharp blade of remorse.  Would they never have done punishing her?

And then:  “Maisie knows what you are.  She told Eliot you were the most beautiful thing, morally, she had ever known.  The one person, she said, whose motives would always be clean.”

If he had tried he couldn’t have hit on anything that would have hurt her so.  It was more than she could bear to be punished like this through the innocence of innocent people, through their kindness and affection, their belief, their incorruptible trust in her.  There was nothing in the world she dreaded more than Maisie’s trust.  It was as if she foresaw what it would do to her, how at any minute it would beat her, it would break her down.

But she was not beaten yet, not broken down.  After every fit of remorse her passion asserted itself again in a superb recovery.  Her motives might not be so spotless as they looked to Maisie, but her passion itself was clean as fire.  Nothing, not even Maisie’s innocence, Maisie’s trust in her, could make her go back on it.  Hard, wounding tears cut through her eyelids as she thought of Maisie, but she brushed them away and began counting the days till Jerrold should come back.

iii

He came back the first week in June, in time for the hay harvest.  And it happened as she had foreseen.

It would have been dangerous for Jerrold to have left the house at night to go to the Manor Farm.  At any moment he might have been betrayed by his own footsteps treading the passages and stairs, by the slipping of locks and bolts, the sound of the opening and shutting of doors.  The servants might be awake and hear him; they might go to his room and find that he was not there.

But Colin’s shelter stood in a recess on the lawn, open to the fields and hidden from the house by tall hedges of yew.  Nobody could see him slip out into the moonlight or the darkness; nobody could hear the soft padding of his feet on the grass.  He had only to run down the three fields and cross the belt of firs to come to Anne’s shelter at the bottom.  The blank, projecting wall of the mill hid it from the cottages and the Manor Farm house; the firs hid it from the field path; a high bank, topped by a stone wall, hid it from the road and Sutton’s Farm.  Its three wooden walls held them safe.