“Oh, Jerrold, that’s the worst that’s happened yet.  Everybody’ll cut her, because of me.”

“Bless you, she won’t care.  She says she doesn’t care about anybody but you and me.”

“But that’s the awful thing, her caring.  That’s the punishment.  The punishment.”

Again he took her in his arms and comforted her.

“What am I to do, Jerry?  What am I to do?”

“Go to her,” he said, “and say something nice.”

“Go to her and take my punishment?”

“Well, yes, darling, I’m afraid you’ve got to take it.  We can’t have it both ways.  It wouldn’t be a punishment if you weren’t so sweet, if you didn’t mind so.  I wish to God I’d never told you.”

She held her head high.

“I made you.  I’m glad you told me.”

She went up to Maisie in her room.  Maisie had dressed for dinner and lay on her couch, looking exquisite and fragile in a gown of thick white lace.  She gave a little soft cry as Anne came to her.

“Anne, you’ve been crying.  What is it, darling?”

“Nothing.  Only Jerrold told me what you’d done.”

“Done?”

“Yes, for me.  Why did you do it, Maisie?”

“Why?  I suppose it was because I love you.  It was the least I could do.”

She held out her hands to her.  Anne knelt down, crouching on the floor beside her, with her face hidden against Maisie’s body.  Maisie put her arm round her.

“But why are you crying about it, Anne?  You never cry.  I can’t bear it.  It’s like seeing Jerrold cry.”

“It’s because you’re so good, so good, and I’m such a brute.  You don’t know what a brute I am.”

“Oh yes, I know.”

“Do you?” she said, sharply.  For one moment she thought that Maisie did indeed know, know and understand so perfectly that she forgave.  This was forgiveness.

“Of course I do.  And so does Jerrold. He knows what a brute you are.”

It was not forgiveness.  It was Maisie’s innocence again, her trust—­the punishment.  Anne knelt there and took the pain of it.

vi

She lay awake, alone in her shelter.  She had given the excuse of a racking headache to keep Jerrold from coming to her.  For that she had had to lie.  But what was her whole existence but a lie?  A lie told by her silence under Maisie’s trust in her, by her acceptance of Maisie’s friendship, by her acquiescence in Maisie’s preposterous belief.  Every minute that she let Maisie go on loving and trusting and believing in her she lied.  And the appalling thing was that she couldn’t be alone in her lying.  So long as Maisie trusted him Jerrold lied, too—­Jerrold, who was truth itself.  One moment she thought:  That’s what I’ve brought him to.  That’s how I’ve dragged him down.  The next she saw that reproach as the very madness of her conscience.  She had not dragged Jerrold down; she had raised him to his highest intensity of loving, she had brought him, out of the illusion of his life with Maisie, to reality and kept him there in an immaculate faithfulness.  Not even for one insane moment did Anne admit that there was anything wrong or shameful in their passion itself.  It was Maisie’s innocence that made them liars, Maisie’s goodness that put them in the wrong and brought shame on them, her truth that falsified them.