Downstairs in the library he turned on him.

“Look here; there’s no good lying to me.  I want truth.”

“My dear Fielding, I shouldn’t dream of lying to you.  There’s nothing wrong with your wife’s heart.  Nothing organically wrong.”

“With that pain?  She was in agony, Ransome, agony.  Why can’t you tell me at once that it’s angina?”

“Because it isn’t.  Not the real thing.  False angina’s a neurosis, not a heart disease.  Get the nervous condition cured and she’ll be all right.  Has she had any worry?  Any shock?”

“Not that I know.”

“Any cause for worry?”

He hesitated.  Poor Maisie had had cause enough if she had known.  But she didn’t know.  It seemed to him that Ransome was looking at him queerly.

“No,” he said.  “None.”

“You’re quite certain?  Has she ever had any?”

“Well, I suppose she was pretty jumpy all the time I was at the front.”

“Before that?  Years ago?”

“That I don’t know.  I should say not.”

“You won’t swear?”

“No.  I won’t swear.  It would be years before we were married.”

“Try and find out,” said Ransome.  “And keep her quiet and happy.  She’d better stay in bed for a week or two.”

So Maisie stayed in bed, and Jerrold and Anne sat with her, together or in turn.  He had a bed made up in her room and slept there when he slept at all.  But half the night he lay awake, listening for the sound of her panting and the little gasping cry that would come when the pain got her.  He kept on getting up to look at her and make sure that she was sleeping.

He was changed from his old happy, careless self, the self that used to turn from any trouble, that refused to believe that the people it loved could be ill and die.  He was convinced that Maisie’s state was dangerous.  He sent for Dr. Harper of Cheltenham and for a nerve specialist and a heart specialist from London and they all told him the same thing.  And he wouldn’t believe them.  Because Maisie’s death was the most unbearable thing that his remorse could imagine, he felt that nothing short of Maisie’s death would appease the powers that punished him.  He was the more certain that Maisie would die because he had denied that she was ill.  For Jerrold’s mind remembered everything and anticipated nothing.  Like most men who refuse to see or foresee trouble, he was crushed by it when it came.

The remorse he felt might have been less intolerable if he had been alone in it; but, day after day, his pain was intensified by the sight of Anne’s pain.  She was exquisitely vulnerable, and for every pang that stabbed her he felt himself responsible.  What they had done they had done together, and they suffered for it together, but in the beginning she had done it for him, and he had made her do it.  Nobody, not even Maisie, could have been more innocent than Anne.  He had no doubt that, left to herself, she would have hidden her passion from him to the end of time.  He, therefore, was the cause of her suffering.