That evening John Severn came into his wife’s room as she was dressing for dinner.

“I wish to goodness Anne hadn’t this craze for farming,” he said.  “She’s simply working herself to death.  I never saw her look so seedy.  I’m sorry Jerrold let her have that farm.”

“So am I,” said Adeline.  “I never saw Jerry look so seedy, either.  Maisie’s been behaving like a perfect idiot.  If she wanted them to go off together she couldn’t have done better.”

“You don’t imagine,” John said, “that’s what they’re after?”

“How do I know what they’re after?  You never can tell with people like Jerrold and Anne.  They’re both utterly reckless.  They don’t care who suffers so long as they get what they want.  If Anne had the morals of a—­of a mouse, she’d clear out.”

“I think,” John said, “you’re mistaken.  Anne isn’t like that....  I hope you haven’t said anything to Maisie?”

Adeline made a face at him, as much as to say, “What do you take me for?” She lifted up her charming, wilful face and powdered it carefully.

iii

The earth smelt of the coming rain.  All night the trees had whispered of rain coming to-morrow.  Now they waited.

At noon the wind dropped.  Thick clouds, the colour of dirty sheep’s wool, packed tight by their own movement, roofed the sky and walled it round, hanging close to the horizon.  A slight heaving and swelling in the grey mass packed it tighter.  It was pregnant with rain.  Here and there a steaming vapour broke from it as if puffed out by some immense interior commotion.  Thin tissues detached themselves and hung like a frayed hem, lengthening, streaming to the hilltops in the west.

Anne was going up the fields towards the Manor and Jerrold was coming down towards the Manor Farm.  They met at the plantation as the first big drops fell.

He called out to her, “I say, you oughtn’t to be out a day like this.”

Anne had been ill all January with a slight touch of pleurisy after a cold that she had taken no care of.

“I’m going to see Maisie.”

“You’re not,” he said.  “It’s going to rain like fury.”

“Maisie knows I don’t mind rain,” Anne said, and laughed.

“Maisie’d have a fit if she knew you were out in it.  Look, how it’s coming down over there.”

Westwards and northwards the round roof and walls of cloud were shaken and the black rain hung sheeted between sky and earth.  Overhead the dark tissues thinned out and lengthened.  The fir trees quivered; they gave out slight creaking, crackling noises as the rain came down.  It poured off each of the sloping fir branches like a jet from a tap.

“We must make a dash for it,” Jerrold said.  And they ran together, laughing, down the field to Anne’s shelter at the bottom.  He pushed back the sliding door.

The rain drummed on the roof and went hissing along the soaked ground; it sprayed out as the grass bent and parted under it; every hollow tuft was a water spout.  The fields were dim behind the shining, glassy bead curtain of the rain.