“Look here, Eliot, what did your mother tell you for?”

“Same reason.  To put me off, too.”

They looked at each other and smiled.  Across their memories, across the years of war, across Anne’s agony they smiled.  Besides its courage and its young, candid cynicism, Anne’s smile expressed her utter trust in him.

“As if,” Eliot said, “it would have made the smallest difference.”

“Wouldn’t it have?”

“No, Anne.  Nothing would.”

“That’s what Jerrold said.  And he thought it.  I wondered what he meant.”

“He meant what I mean.”

The moments passed, ticked off by the beating of his heart, time and his heart beating violently together.  Not one of them was his moment, not one would serve him for what he had to say, falling so close on their intolerable conversation.  He meant to ask Anne to marry him; but if he did it now she would suspect him of chivalry; it would look as if he wanted to make up to her for all she had lost through Colin; as if he wanted more than anything to save her.

So Eliot, who had waited so long, waited a little longer, till the evening of his last day.

iii

Anne had gone up with him to Wyck Manor, to see the soldiers.  Ever since they had come there she had taken cream and fruit to them twice a week from the Farm.  Unaware of what was thought of her, she never knew that the scandal of young Fielding and Miss Severn had penetrated the Convalescent Home with the fruit and cream.  And if she had known it she would not have stayed away.  People’s beastliness was no reason why she shouldn’t go where she wanted, where she had always gone.  The Convalescent Home belonged to the Fieldings, and the Fieldings were her dearest friends who had been turned into relations by her father’s marriage.  So this evening, absorbed in the convalescents, she never saw the matron’s queer look at her or her pointed way of talking only to Eliot.

Eliot saw it.

He thought:  “It doesn’t matter.  She’s so utterly good that nothing can touch her.  All the same, if she marries me she’ll be safe from this sort of thing.”

They had come to the dip of the valley and the Manor Farm water.

“Let’s go up the beech walk,” he said.

They went up and sat in the beech ring where Anne had sat with Jerrold three months ago.  Eliot never realised how repeatedly Jerrold had been before him.

“Anne,” he said, “it’s more than five years since I asked you to marry me.”

“Is it, Eliot?”

“Do you remember I said then I’d never give you up?”

“I remember.  Unless Jerrold got me, you said.  Well, he hasn’t got me.”

“I wouldn’t want you to tie yourself up with me if there was the remotest chance of Jerrold; but, as there isn’t, don’t you think—­”

“No, Eliot, I don’t.”

“But you do care for me, Anne, a little.  I know you do.”