“She’s asleep, Jerrold.”

They sat still, making no sound.

And as she looked at Maisie sleeping, tears came again into Anne’s eyes, the hard tears that cut her eyelids and spilled themselves, drop by slow drop, heavily.  She tried to wipe them away secretly with her hand before Jerrold saw them; but they came again and again and he had seen.  He had risen to his feet as if he would go, then checked himself and stood beside her; and together they looked on at Maisie’s sleeping; they felt together the infinite anguish, the infinite pathos of her goodness and her trust.  The beauty of her spirit lay bare to them in the white, tilted face, slackened and smoothed with sleep.  Sleep showed them her innocence again, naked and helpless.  They saw her in her poignant being, her intense reality.  She was so real that in that moment nothing else mattered to them.

Anne set her teeth hard to keep her mouth still.  She saw Jerrold glance at her, she heard him give a soft groan of pity or of pain; then he moved away from them and stood by the terrace wall with his back to her.  She saw his clenched hands, and through his terrible, tense quietness she knew by the quivering of his shoulders that his breast heaved.  Then she saw him grasp the terrace wall and grind the edge of it into the palms of his hands.  That was how he had stood by his father’s deathbed, gripping the foot-rail; and when presently he turned and came to her she saw the look on his face she had seen then, of young, blind agony, sharpened now with some more piercing spiritual pain.

“Come,” he said, “come into the house.”

They went together, side by side, as they had gone when they were children, along the terrace and down the steps into the drive.  In the shelter of the hall she gave way and cried, openly and helplessly, like a child, and he put his arm round her and led her into the library, away from the place where Maisie was.  They sat together on the couch, holding each other’s hands, clinging together in their suffering, their memory of what Maisie had made their sin.  Even so they had sat in Anne’s room, on the edge of Anne’s bed, when they were children, holding each other’s hands, miserable and yet glad because they were brought together, because what they had done and what they had borne they had done and borne together.  And now as then he comforted her.

“Don’t cry, Anne darling; it isn’t your fault.  I made you.”

“You didn’t.  You didn’t.  I wanted you and I made you come to me.  And I knew what it would be like and you didn’t.”

“Nobody could have known.  Don’t go back on it.”

“I’m not going back on it.  If only I’d never seen Maisie—­then I wouldn’t have cared.  We could have gone on.”

“Do you mean we can’t now?”

“Yes.  How can we when she’s such an angel to us and trusts us so?”

“It does make it pretty beastly,” he said.

“It makes me feel absolutely rotten.”