“I see.  It’s like that, is it?”

“It’s like that.”

Eliot said no more.  He knew when he was beaten.

v

Maisie sat alone in her own room, thinking it over.  She didn’t know yet that Eliot had come.  He had arrived while she was with Anne and she had missed him on the way to Barrow Farm, driving up by the hill road while he walked down through the fields.

She didn’t think of Jerrold all at once.  Her mind was taken up with Anne and Anne’s unhappiness.  She could see nothing else.  She remembered how Adeline had told her that Anne was in love with Jerrold.  She had said, “It was funny when she was a little thing.”  Anne had loved him all her life, then.  All her life she had had to do without him.

Maisie thought:  Perhaps he would have loved her and married her if it hadn’t been for me.  And yet Anne had loved her.

That was Anne’s beauty.

She wondered next:  If Anne had been in love with Jerrold all that time, and if they had all seen it, all the Fieldings and John Severn, how was it that she had never seen it?  She had seen nothing but a perfect friendship, and she had tried to keep it for them in all its perfection, so that neither of them should miss anything because Jerrold had married her.  She remembered how happy Anne had been when she first knew her, and she thought:  If she was happy then, why is she unhappy now?  If she loved Jerrold all her life, if she had done without him all her life, why go away now?

Unless something had happened.

It was then that Maisie thought of Jerrold, and his sad, drawn face and his sudden sickness the other day.  That was the day he had been with Anne, when she had told him that she was going away.  He had never been the same since.  He had neither slept nor eaten.

Maisie had all the pieces of the puzzle loose before her, and at first sight not one of them looked as if it would fit.  But this piece under her hand fitted.  Jerrold’s illness joined on to Anne’s going.  With a terrible dread in her heart Maisie put the two things together and saw the third thing.  Jerrold was ill because Anne was going away.  He wouldn’t be ill unless he cared for her.  And another thing.  Anne was going away, not because she cared, but because Jerrold cared.  Therefore she knew that he cared for her.  Therefore he had told her.  That was what had happened.

When she had put all the pieces into their places she would have the whole story.

But Maisie didn’t want to know any more.  She had enough to make her heart break.  She still clung to her belief in their goodness.  They were unhappy because they had given each other up.  And under all her thinking, like a quick-running pain, there went her premonition of its end.  She remembered that they had been happy once when she first knew them.  If they were unhappy now because they had given each other up, had they been happy then because they hadn’t?  For a moment she asked herself, “Were they—?” and was afraid to finish and answer her own question.  It was enough that they were all unhappy now and that none of them would ever be happy again.  Not Anne.  Not Jerrold. Their unhappiness didn’t bear thinking of, and in thinking of it Maisie forgot her own.