“God knows I ought to have been.”

“You’re worried about her, and you think there’s something wrong.  If she says there isn’t, you’ll say that’s what you want to be sure of.”

“Look here; how do those fellows know it isn’t the real thing?”

“Oh, they can tell that by the state of her heart.  I don’t suppose for a moment it’s the real thing.  She wouldn’t be alive if it was.  And you don’t die of false angina.  It’s all nerves, though it hurts like sin.”

He was silent for a second.

“Anne—­she’s beaten us.  We can’t tell her now.”

“No.  And we can’t go on.  If we can’t be straight about it we’ve got to give each other up.”

“I know.  We can’t go on.  There’s nothing more to be said.”

His voice dropped on her aching heart with the toneless weight of finality.

“We’ve got to end it now, this minute,” she said.  “Don’t come any farther.”

“Let me go to the bottom of the field.”

“No.  I’m not going that way.”

He had come close to her now, close, as though he would have taken her in his arms for the last night, the last time.  He wanted to touch her, to hold her back from the swallowing darkness.  But she moved out of his reach and he did not follow her.  His passion was ready to flame up if he touched her, and he was afraid.  They must end it clean, without a word or a touch.

The grass drive between the firs led to a gate on the hill road that skirted the Manor fields.  He knew that she would go from him that way, because she didn’t want to pass by their shelter at the bottom.  She couldn’t sleep in it tonight.

He stood still and watched her go, her white coat glimmering in the darkness between the black rows of firs.  The white gate glimmered at the end of the drive.  She stood there a moment.  He saw her slip like a white ghost between the gate and the gate post; he heard the light thud of the wooden latch falling back behind her, and she was gone.

XVII

JERROLD, MAISIE, ANNE, ELIOT

i

Maisie lay in bed, helpless and abandoned to her illness.  It was no good trying to cover it up and hide it any more.  Jerrold knew.

The night when he left Anne he had gone up to Maisie in her room.  He couldn’t rest unless he knew that she was all right.  He had stooped over her to kiss her and she had sat up, holding her face to him, her hands clasped round his neck, drawing him close to her, when suddenly the pain gripped her and she lay back in his arms, choking, struggling for breath.

Jerrold thought she was dying.  He waited till the pain passed and she was quieted, then he ran downstairs and telephoned for Ransome.  He looked on in agony while Ransome’s stethoscope wandered over Maisie’s thin breast and back.  It seemed to him that Ransome was taking an unusually long time about it, that he must be on the track of some terrible discovery.  And when Ransome took the tubes from his ears and said, curtly, “Heart quite sound; nothing wrong there,” he was convinced that Ransome was an old fool who didn’t know his business.  Or else he was lying for Maisie’s sake.