Jerrold looked at her.  Anne’s tired face, trying to smile, wrung his heart.  So did the happiness in Maisie’s eyes.  And Anne’s voice trying to sound as if she were happy.

“You darlings!  How nice you’ve made it.”

“Do you like it?”

Maisie was breathless with joy.

“I love it.  I adore it!  But—­aren’t there lots of things that weren’t here before?  Where did that table come from?”

“From the Manor Farm.  Don’t you remember it?  That’s Eliot.”

“And the bureau, and the dresser, and those heavenly rugs?”

“That’s Jerrold.”

And the china was Colin, and the chintz was Maisie.  The long couch for Anne to lie down on was Maisie.  Everything that was not Anne’s they had given her.

“You shouldn’t have done it,” she said.

“We did it for ourselves.  To keep you with us,” said Maisie.

“Did you think it would take all that?”

She wondered whether they saw how hard she was trying to look happy, not to be too tired to care.

Then Maisie took her upstairs to show her her bedroom and the white bathroom.  Colin carried the lamp.  He left them together in Anne’s room.  Maisie turned to her there.

“Darling, how tired you look.  Are you too tired to be happy?”

“I’d be a brute if I weren’t happy,” Anne said.

But she wasn’t happy.  The minute they were gone her sadness came upon her, crushing her down.  She could hear Colin and Maisie, the two innocent ones, laughing out into the darkness.  She saw again Jerrold’s hard, unhappy face trying to smile; his mouth jerking in the tight, difficult smile that was like an agony.  And it used to be Jerrold who was always happy, who went laughing.

She turned up and down the beautiful lighted room; she looked again and again at the things they had given her, Colin and Jerrold and Maisie.

Maisie.  She would have to live with the cruelty of Maisie’s gifts, with Maisie’s wounding kindness and her innocence.  Maisie’s curtains, Maisie’s couch, covered with flowers that smiled at her, gay on the white ground.  She thought of the other house, of the curtains that had shut out the light from her and Jerrold, of the couch where she had lain in his arms.  Each object had a dumb but poignant life that reminded and reproached her.

This was the scene where her life was to be cast.  Henceforth these things would know her in her desolation.  Jerrold would never come to her here as he had come to the Manor Farm house; they would never sit together talking by this fireside; those curtains would never be drawn on their passion; he would never go up to that lamp and put it out; she would never lie here waiting, thrilling, as he came to her through the darkness.

She had wanted the Barrow Farm and she had got what she had wanted, and she had got it too late.  She loved it.  Yet how was it possible to love the place that she was to be so unhappy in?  She ought to hate it with its enclosing walls, its bright-eyed, watching furniture, its air of quiet complicity in her pain.