She drew back the curtains.  The lamp and its yellow flame hung out there on the darkness of the fields.  The fields dropped away through the darkness to the river, and there were the black masses of the trees.

There the earth waited for her.  Out there was the only life left for her to live.  The life of struggling with the earth, forcing the earth to yield to her more than it had yielded to the men who had tilled it before her, making the bad land good.  Ploughing time would come and seed time, and hay harvest and corn harvest.  Feeding time and milking time would come.  She would go on seeing the same things done at the same hour, at the same season, day after day and year after year.  There would have been joy in that if it had been Jerrold’s land, if she could have gone on working for Jerrold and with Jerrold.  And if she had not been so tired.

She was only twenty-nine and Jerrold was only thirty-two.  She wondered how many more ploughing times they would have to go through, how many seed times and harvests.  And how would they go through them?  Would they go on getting more and more tired, or would something happen?

No.  Nothing would happen.  Nothing that they could bear to think of.  They would just go on.

In the stillness of the house she could feel her heart beating, measuring out time, measuring out her pain.

ii

That winter Adeline and John Severn came down to Wyck Manor for
Christmas and the New Year.

Adeline was sitting in the drawing-room with Maisie in the heavy hour before tea time.  All afternoon she had been trying to talk to Maisie, and she was now bored.  Jerrold’s wife had always bored her.  She couldn’t imagine why Jerrold had married her when it was so clear that he was not in love with her.

“It’s funny,” she said at last, “staying in your own house when it isn’t your own any more.”

Maisie hoped that Adeline would treat the house as if it were her own.

“I probably shall.  Don’t be surprised if you hear me giving orders to the servants.  I really cannot consider that Wilkins belongs to anybody but me.”

Maisie hoped that Adeline wouldn’t consider that he didn’t.

And there was a pause.  Adeline looked at the clock and saw that there was still another half-hour till tea time.  How could they possibly fill it in?  Then, suddenly, from a thought of Jerrold so incredibly married to Maisie, Adeline’s mind wandered to Anne.

“Is Anne dining here tonight?” she said.

And Maisie said yes, she thought Adeline and Mr. Severn would like to see as much as possible of Anne.  And Adeline said that was very kind of Maisie, and was bored again.

She saw nothing before her but more and more boredom; and the subject of Anne alone held out the prospect of relief.  She flew to it as she would have fled from any danger.

“By the way, Maisie, if I were you I wouldn’t let Anne see too much of Jerrold.”