Now she remembered.  She was going away.  She would never see Jerrold again.  She was going to Canada.

The sharp, clear name made the whole thing real and irrevocable.  It was something that would actually happen soon.  To her.  She was going.  And when she had gone she would not come back.

She got up and looked out of the window.  She saw the green field sloping down to the river and the road, and beyond the road, to the right, the rise of the Manor fields and the belt of firs.  And in her mind, more real than they, the Manor house, the garden, and the many-coloured hills beyond, rolling, curve after curve, to the straight, dark-blue horizon.  The scene that held her childhood, all her youth, all her happiness; that had drawn her back, again and again, in memory and in dreams, making her heart ache.  How could she leave it?  How could she live with that pain?

If she was going to be a coward, if she was going to be afraid of pain—­How was she to escape it, how was Jerrold to escape?  If she stayed on they would break down together and give in; they would be lovers again, and again Maisie’s sweet, wounding face would come between them; they could never get away from it; and in the end their remorse would be as unbearable as their separation.  She couldn’t drag Jerrold through that agony again.

No.  Life wasn’t worth living if you were a coward and afraid.  And under all her misery Anne had still the sense that life was somehow worth living even if it made you miserable.  Life was either your friend or your enemy.  If it was your friend you served it; if it was your enemy you stood up to it and refused to let it beat you, and your enemy became your servant.  Whatever happened, your work remained.  Still there would be ploughing and sowing, and reaping and ploughing again.  Still the earth waited.  She thought of the unknown Canadian earth that waited for her tilling.

Jerrold was not a coward.  He was not afraid—­well, only afraid of the people he loved getting ill and dying; and she was not going to get ill and die.

She would have to tell him.  She would go to him in the fields and tell him.

But before she did that she must make the thing irrevocable.  So Anne wrote to the steamship company, booking her passage in two weeks’ time; she wrote to Eliot, asking him to call at the company’s office and see if he could get her a decent cabin.  She went to Wyck and posted her letters, and then to the Far Acres field where Jerrold was watching the ploughing.

They met at the “headland.”  They would be safe there on the ploughed land, in the open air.

“What is it, Anne?” he said.

“Nothing.  I want to talk to you.”

“All right.”

Her set face, her hard voice gave him a premonition of disaster.

“It’s simply this,” she said.  “What happened yesterday mustn’t happen again.”

“It shan’t.  I swear it shan’t.  I was a beast.  I lost my head.”