“Perhaps I do know.  Do you care for him very much, Anne?”

“Yes, I care for him, very much.  And I can’t stand it.”

“It’s so bad that you’ve got to go away?”

“It’s so bad that I’ve got to go away.”

“That’s very brave of you.”

“Or very cowardly.”

“No.  You couldn’t be a coward....  Oh, Anne darling, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.  It’s my own fault.  I’d no business to get into this state.  Don’t let’s talk about it, Maisie.”

“All right, I won’t.  But I’m sorry....  Only one thing.  It—­it hasn’t made you hate me, has it?”

“You know it hasn’t.”

“Oh, Anne, you are beautiful.”

“I’m anything but, if you only knew.”

She had got beyond the pain of Maisie’s goodness, Maisie’s trust.  No possible blow from Maisie’s mind could hurt her now.  Nothing mattered.  Maisie’s trust and goodness didn’t matter, since she had done all she knew; since she was going away; since she would never see Jerrold again, never till their youth was gone and they had ceased to feel.

iv

That afternoon Eliot arrived at Wyck Manor.  His coming was his answer to
Anne’s letter.

He went over to the Barrow Farm about five o’clock when Anne’s work would be done.  Anne was still out, and he waited till she should come back.

As he waited he looked round her room.  This, he thought, was the place that Anne had set her heart on having for her own; it was the home they had made for her.  Something terrible must have happened before she could bring herself to leave it.  She must have been driven to the breaking-point.  She was broken.  Jerrold must have driven and broken her.

He heard her feet on the flagged path, on the threshold of the house; she stood in the doorway of the room, looking at him, startled.

“Eliot, what are you doing there?”

“Waiting for you.  You must have known I’d come.”

“To say good-bye?  That was nice of you.”

“No, not to say good-bye.  I should come to see you off if you were going.”

“But I am going.  You’ve seen about my berth, haven’t you?”

“No, I haven’t.  We’ve got to talk about it first.”

He looked dead tired.  She remembered that she was his hostess.

“Have you had tea?”

“No.  You’re going to give me some.  Then we’ll talk about it.”

“Talking won’t be a bit of good.”

“I think it may be,” he said.

She rang the bell and they waited.  She gave him his tea, and while they ate and drank he talked to her about the weather and the land, and about his work and the book he had just finished on Amoebic Dysentery, and about Colin and how well he was now.  Neither of them spoke of Jerrold or of Maisie.

When the tea things were cleared away he leaned back and looked at her with his kind, deep-set, attentive eyes.  She loved Eliot’s eyes, and his queer, clever face that was so like and so unlike his father’s, so utterly unlike Jerrold’s.