But she was angry too—­her heart burned to think not only of Ellen’s sin but of the casual way in which she treated it.  “I won’t have none of her loose notions here,” said Joanna grimly.  She made up her mind to give her sister a good talking to, to convince her of the way in which her “goings on” struck decent folk; but she would not do it at the start—­“I’ll give her time to settle down a bit first.”

During the few days which elapsed between Ellen’s telegram and her arrival, Joanna saw nothing of Alce.  She had one letter from him, in which he told her that he had been over to Fairfield to look at the plough she was speaking of, but that it was old stuff and would be no use to her.  He did not even mention Ellen’s name.  She wondered if he was making any plans for leaving Donkey Street—­she hoped he would not be such a fool as to go.  He and Ellen could easily keep out of each other’s way.  Still, if Ellen wouldn’t stay unless he went, she would rather have Ellen than Alce....  He would have to sell Donkey Street, or perhaps he might let it off for a little time.

April had just become May when Ellen returned to Ansdore.  It had been a rainy spring, and great pools were on the marshes, overflows from the dykes and channels, clear mirrors green from the grass beneath their shallows and the green rainy skies that hung above them.  Here and there they reflected white clumps and walls of hawthorn, with the pale yellowish gleam of the buttercups in the pastures.  The two sisters, driving back from Rye, looked round on the green twilight of the Marsh with indifferent eyes.  Joanna had ceased to look for any beauty in her surroundings since Martin’s days—­the small gift of sight that he had given her had gone out with the light of his own eyes, and this evening all she saw was the flooded pastures, which meant poor grazing for her tegs due to come down from the Coast, and her lambs new-born on the Kent Innings.  As for Ellen, the Marsh had always stood with her for unrelieved boredom.  Its eternal flatness—­the monotony of its roads winding through an unvarying landscape of reeds and dykes and grazings, past farms each of which was almost exactly like the one before it, with red walls and orange roofs and a bush of elms and oaks—­the wearisome repetition of its seasons—­the mists and floods of winter, the may and buttercups of spring, the hay and meadow-sweet and wild carrot of the summer months, the bleakness and winds of autumn—­all this was typical of her life there, water-bound, cut off from all her heart’s desire of variety and beauty and elegance, of the life to which she must now return because her attempt to live another had failed and left her stranded on a slag-heap of disillusion from which even Ansdore was a refuge.