"Do you remember the walk to High Slaughter?"

"Do you remember the booby-trap we set for poor Pinkney?"

That was dangerous, for poor Pinkney was at the War.

"Do you remember Benjy?"

"Yes, rather."

But Benjy was dangerous, too; for Jerrold had given him to her. She could feel Colin shying.

"He had a butterfly smut," he said. "Hadn't he? ...Do you remember how I used to come and see you at Cheltenham?"

"And Grannie and Aunt Emily, and how you used to play on their piano. And how Grannie jumped when you came down crash on those chords in the Waldstein."

"Do you mean the presto?"

"Yes. The last movement."

"No wonder she jumped. I should jump now." He turned his mournful face to her. "Anne—I shall never be able to play again."

There was danger everywhere. In the end all ways led back to Colin's malady.

"Oh yes, you wall when you're quite strong."

"I shall never be stronger."

"You will. You're stronger already."

She knew he was stronger. He could sleep three hours on end now and he had left off screaming.

And still the doors were left open between their rooms at night. He was still afraid to sleep alone; he liked to know that she was there, close to him.

Instead of the dreams, instead of the sudden rushing, crashing horror, he was haunted by a nameless dread. Dread of something he didn't know, something that waited for him, something he couldn't face. Something that hung over him at night, that was there with him in the morning, that came between him and the light of the sun.

Anne kept it away. Anne came between it and him. He was unhappy and frightened when Anne was not there.

It was always, "You're not going, Anne?"

"Yes. But I'm coming back."

"How soon?"

And she would say, "An hour;" or, "Half an hour," or, "Ten minutes."

"Don't be longer."

"No."

And then: "I don't know how it is, Anne. But everything seems all right when you're there, and all wrong when you're not."

ii

The Manor Farm house stands in the hamlet of Upper Speed. It has the grey church and churchyard beside it and looks across the deep road towards Sutton's farm.

The beautiful Jacobean house, the church and church-yard, Sutton's farm and the rectory, the four cottages and the Mill, the river and its bridge, lie close together in the small flat of the valley. Green pastures slope up the hill behind them to the north; pink-brown arable lands, ploughed and harrowed, are flung off to either side, east and west.

Northwards the valley is a slender slip of green bordering the slender river. Southwards, below the bridge, the water meadows widen out past Sutton's farm. From the front windows of the Manor Farm house you see them, green between the brown trunks of the elms on the road bank. From the back you look out across orchard and pasture to the black, still water and yellow osier beds above the Mill. Beyond the water a double line of beeches, bare delicate branches, rounded head after rounded head, climbs a hillock in a steep curve, to part and meet again in a thick ring at the top.

The house front stretches along a sloping grass plot, the immense porch built out like a wing with one ball-topped gable above it, a smaller gable in the roof behind. On either side two rows of wide black windows, heavy browed, with thick stone mullions.

Barker, Jerrold Fielding's agent, used to live there; but before the spring of nineteen sixteen Barker had joined up, Wyck Manor had been turned into a home for convalescent soldiers, and Anne was living with Colin at the Manor Farm.

Half of her Ilford land had been taken by the government; and she had let the rest together with the house and orchard. Instead of her own estate she had the Manor to look after now. It had been impossible in war-time to fill Barker's place, and Anne had become Jerrold's agent. She had begun with a vague promise to give a look round now and then; but when the spring came she found herself doing Barker's work, keeping the farm accounts, ordering fertilizers, calculating so many hundredweights of superphosphate of lime, or sulphate of ammonia, or muriate of potash to the acre; riding about on Barker's horse, looking after the ploughing; plodding through the furrows of the hill slopes to see how the new drillers were working; going the round of the sheep-pens to keep count of the sick ewes and lambs; carrying the motherless lambs in her arms from the fold to the warm kitchen.

She went through February rain and snow, through March wind and sleet, and through the mists of the low meadows; her feet were loaded with earth from the ploughed fields; her nostrils filled with the cold, rich smell of the wet earth; the rank, sharp smell of swedes, the dry, pungent smell of straw and hay; the thick, oily, woolly smell of the folds, the warm, half-sweet, half sour smell of the cattle sheds, of champed fodder, of milky cow's breath; the smell of hot litter and dung.

At five and twenty she had reached the last clear decision of her beauty. Dressed in riding coat and breeches, her body showed more slender and more robust than ever. Rain, sun and wind were cosmetics to her firm, smooth skin. Her eyes were bright dark, washed with the clean air.

On her Essex farm and afterwards at the War she had learned how to handle men. Sulky Curtis, who grumbled under Barker's rule, surrendered to Anne without a scowl. When Anne came riding over the Seven Acre field, lazy Ballinger pulled himself together and ploughed through the two last furrows that he would have left for next day in Barker's time. Even for Ballinger and Curtis she had smiles that atoned for her little air of imperious command.

And Colin followed her about the farmyard and up the fields till he tired and turned back. She would see him standing by the gate she had passed through, looking after her with the mournful look he used to have when he was a little boy and they left him behind.

He would stand looking till Anne's figure, black on her black horse, stood up against the skyline from the curve of the round-topped hill. It dipped; it dipped and disappeared and Colin would go slowly home.

At the first sound of her horse's hoofs in the yard he came out to meet her.

One day he said to her, "Jerrold'll be jolly pleased with what you've done when he comes home."

And then, "If he ever can be pleased with anything again."

It was the first time he had said Jerrold's name.

"That's what's been bothering me," he went on. "I can't think how Jerrold's going to get over it. You remember what he was like when Father died?"

"Yes." She remembered.

"Well—what's the War going to do to him? Look what it's done to me. He minds things so much more than I do."

"It doesn't take everybody the same way, Colin."

"I don't suppose Jerrold'll get shell-shock. But he might get something worse. Something that'll hurt him more. He must mind so awfully."

"You may be sure he won't mind anything that could happen to himself."

"Of course he won't. But the things that'll happen to other people. Seeing the other chaps knocked about and killed."

"He minds most the things that happen to the people he cares about. To you and Eliot. They're the sort of things he can't face. He'd pretend they couldn't happen. But the war's so big that he can't say it isn't happening; he's got to stand up to it. And the things you stand up to don't hurt you. I feel certain he'll come through all right."

That was the turning point in Colin's malady. She thought: "If he can talk about Jerrold he's getting well."

The next day a letter came to her from Jerrold. He wrote: "I wish to goodness I could get leave. I don't want it all the time. I'm quite prepared to stick this beastly job for any reasonable period; but a whole year without leave, it's a bit thick..."

"About Colin. Didn't I tell you he'd be all right? And it's all you, Anne. You've made him; you needn't pretend you haven't. I want most awfully to see you again. There are all sorts of things I'd like to say to you, but I can't write 'em."

She thought: "He's got over it at last, then. He won't be afraid of me any more."

Somehow, since the war she had felt that Jerrold would come back to her. It was as if always, deep down and in secret, she had known that he belonged to her and that she belonged to him as no other person could; that whatever happened and however long a time he kept away from her he would come back at some time, in some way. She couldn't distinguish between Jerrold and her sense of Jerrold; and as nothing could separate her from the sense of him, nothing could separate her from Jerrold himself. He had part in the profound and secret life of her blood and nerves and brain.



IX

JERROLD

i

At last, in March, nineteen-sixteen, Jerrold had got leave.

Anne was right; Jerrold had come through because he had had to stand up to the War and face it. He couldn't turn away. It was too stupendous a fact to be ignored or denied or in any way escaped from. And as he had to "take" it, he took it laughing. Once in the thick of it, Jerrold was sustained by his cheerful obstinacy, his inability to see the things he didn't want to see. He admitted that there was a war, the most appalling war, if you liked, that had ever been; but he refused, all the time, to believe that the Allies would lose it; he refused from moment to moment to believe that they could be beaten in any single action; he denied the possibility of disaster to his own men. Disaster to himself—possibly; probably, in theory; but not in practice. Not when he turned back in the rain of the enemy's fire to find his captain who had dropped wounded among the dead, when he swung him over his shoulder and staggered to the nearest stretcher. He knew he would get through. It was inconceivable to Jerrold that he should not get through. Even in his fifth engagement, when his men broke and gave back in front of the German parapet, and he advanced alone, shouting to them to come on, it was inconceivable that they should not come on. And when they saw him, running forward by himself, they gathered again and ran after him and the trench was taken in a mad rush.

Jerrold got his captaincy and two weeks' leave together. He had meant to spend three days in London with his mother, three days in Yorkshire with the Durhams, and the rest of his time at Upper Speed with Anne and Colin. He was not quite sure whether he wanted to go to the Durhams. More than anything he wanted to see Anne again.

His last unbearable memory of her was wiped out by five years of India and a year of war. He remembered the child Anne who played with him, the girl Anne who went about with him, and the girl woman he had found in her room at dawn. He tried to join on to her the image of the Anne that Eliot wrote to him about, who had gone out to the war and come back from it to look after Colin. He was in love with this image of her and ready to be in love again with the real Anne. He would go back now and find her and make her care for him.

There had been a time, after his father's death, when he had tried to make himself think that Anne had never cared for him, because he didn't want to think she cared. Now that he did want it he wasn't sure.

Not so sure as he was about little Maisie Durham. He knew Maisie cared. That was why she had gone out to India. It was also why she had been sent back again. He was afraid it might be why the Durhams had asked him to stay with them as soon as he had leave. If that was so, he wasn't sure whether he ought to stay with them, seeing that he didn't care for Maisie. But since they had asked him, well, he could only suppose that the Durhams knew what they were about. Perhaps Maisie had got over it. The little thing had lots of sense.

It hadn't been his fault in the beginning, Maisie's caring. Afterwards, perhaps, in India, when he had let himself see more of her than he would have done if he had known she cared; but that, again, was hardly his fault since he didn't know. You don't see these things unless you're on the lookout for them, and you're not on the lookout unless you're a conceited ass. Then when he did see it, when he couldn't help seeing, after other people had seen and made him see, it had been too late.

But this was five years ago, and of course Maisie had got over it. There would be somebody else now. Perhaps he would go down to Yorkshire. Perhaps he wouldn't.

At this point Jerrold realised that it depended on Anne.

But before he saw Anne he would have to see his mother. And before he saw his mother his mother had seen Anne and Colin.

ii

And while Anne in Gloucestershire was answering Jerrold's letter, Jerrold sat in the drawing-room of the house in Montpelier Square and talked to his mother. They talked about Colin and Anne.

"What's Colin's wife doing?" he said.

"Queenie? She's driving a field ambulance car in Belgium."

"Why isn't she looking after Colin?"

"That isn't in Queenie's line. Besides—"

"Besides what?"

"Well, to tell the truth, I don't suppose she'll live with Colin after—"

"After what?"

"Well, after Colin's living with Anne."

Jerrold stiffened. He felt the blood rushing to his heart, betraying him. His face was God only knew what awful colour.

"You don't mean to say they—"

"I don't mean to say I blame them, poor darlings. What were they to do?"

"But" (he almost stammered it) "you don't know—you can't know—it doesn't follow."

"Well, of course, my dear, they haven't told me. You don't shout these things from the house-tops. But what is one to think? There they are; there they've been for the last five months, living together at the Farm, absolutely alone. Anne won't leave him. She won't have anybody there. If you tell her it's not proper she laughs in your face. And Colin swears he won't go back to Queenie. What is one to think?"

Jerrold covered his face with his hands. He didn't know.

His mother went on in a voice of perfect sweetness. "Don't imagine I think a bit the worse of Anne. She's been simply splendid. I never saw anything like her devotion. She's brought Colin round out of the most appalling state. We've no business to complain of a situation we're all benefitting by. Some people can do these things and you forgive them. Whatever Anne does or doesn't do she'll always be a perfect darling. As for Queenie, I don't consider her for a minute. She's been simply asking for it."

He wondered whether it were really true. It didn't follow that Anne and Colin were lovers because his mother said so; even supposing that she really thought it.

"You don't go telling everybody, I hope?" he said.

"My dear Jerrold, what do you think I'm made of? I haven't even told Anne's father. I've only told you because I thought you ought to know."

"I see; you want to put me off Anne?"

"I don't want to. But it would, wouldn't it?"

"Oh Lord, yes, if it was true. Perhaps it isn't."

"Jerry dear, it may be awfully immoral of me, but for Colin's sake I can't help hoping that it is. I did so want Anne to marry Colin—really he's only right when he's with her—and if Queenie divorces him I suppose she will."

"But, mother, you are going ahead. You may be quite wrong."

"I may. You can only suppose—"

"How on earth am I to know? I can't ask them."

"No, you can't ask them."

Of course he couldn't. He couldn't go to Colin and say, "Are you Anne's lover?" He couldn't go to Anne and say, "Are you Colin's mistress?"

"If they wanted us to know," said Adeline, "they'd have told us. There you are."

"Supposing it isn't true, do you imagine he cares for her?"

"Yes, Jerrold. I'm quite, quite sure of that. I was down there last week and saw them. He can't bear her out of his sight one minute. He couldn't not care."

"And Anne?"

"Oh, well, Anne isn't going to give herself away. But I'm certain... Would she stick down there, with everybody watching them and thinking things and talking, if she didn't care so much that nothing matters?"

"But would she—would she—"

The best of his mother was that in these matters her mind jumped to meet yours halfway. You hadn't got to put things into words.

"My dear, if you think she wouldn't, supposing she cared enough, you don't know Anne."

"I shall go down," he said, "and see her."

"If you do, for goodness' sake be careful. Even supposing there's nothing in it, you mustn't let Colin see you think there is. He'd feel then that he ought to leave her for fear of compromising her. And if he leaves her he'll be as bad as ever again. And I can't manage him. Nobody can manage him but Anne. That's how they've tied our hands. We can't say anything."

"I see."

"After all, Jerrold, it's very simple. If they're innocent we must leave them in their innocence. And if they're not——"

"If they're not?"

"Well, we must leave them in that."

Jerrold laughed. But he was not in the least amused.

iii

He went down to Wyck the next day; he couldn't wait till the day after.

Not that he had the smallest hope of Anne now. Even if his mother's suspicion were unfounded, she had made it sufficiently clear to him that Anne was necessary to Colin; and, that being so, the chances were that Colin cared for her. In these matters his mother was not such a fool as to be utterly mistaken. On every account, therefore, he must be prepared to give Anne up. He couldn't take her away from Colin, and he wouldn't if he could. It was his own fault. What was done was done six years ago. He should have loved Anne then.

Going down in the train he thought of her, a little girl with short black hair, holding a black-and-white rabbit against her breast, a little girl with a sweet mouth ready for kisses, who hung herself round his neck with sudden, loving arms. A big girl with long black hair tied in an immense black bow, a girl too big for kisses. A girl sitting in her room between her white bed and the window with a little black cat in her arms. Her platted hair lay in a thick black rope down her back. He remembered how he had kissed her; he remembered the sliding of her sweet face against his, the pressure of her darling head against his shoulder, the salt taste of her tears. It was inconceivable that he had not loved Anne then. Why hadn't he? Why had he let his infernal cowardice stop him? Eliot had loved her.

Then he remembered Colin. Little Col-Col running after them down the field, calling to them to take him with them; Colin's hands playing; Colin's voice singing Lord Rendal. He tried to think of Queenie, the woman Colin had married. He had no image of her. He could see nothing but Colin and Anne.

She was there alone at the station to meet him. She came towards him along the platform. Their eyes looked for each other. Something choked his voice back. She spoke first.

"Jerrold———"

"Anne." A strange, thick voice deep down in his throat.

Their hands clasped one into the other, close and strong.

"Colin wanted to come, but I wouldn't let him. It would have been too much for him. He might have cried or something ... You mustn't mind if he cries when he sees you. He isn't quite right yet."

"No, but he's better."

"Ever so much better. He can do things on the farm now. He looks after the lambs and the chickens and the pigs. It's good for him to have something to do."

Jerrold agreed that it was good.

They had reached the Manor Farm now.

"Don't take any notice if he cries," she said.

Colin waited for him in the hall of the house. He was trying hard to control himself, but when he saw Jerrold coming up the path he broke down in a brief convulsive crying that stopped suddenly at the touch of Jerrold's hand.

Anne left them together.

iv

"Don't go, Anne."

Colin called her back when she would have left them, again after dinner.

"Don't you want Jerrold to yourself?" she said.

"We don't want you to go, do we, Jerrold?"

"Rather not."

Jerrold found himself looking at them all the time. He had tried to persuade himself that what his mother had told him was not true. But he wasn't sure. Look as he would, he was not sure.

If only his mother hadn't told him, he might have gone on believing in what she had called their innocence. But she had shown him what to look for, and for the life of him he couldn't help seeing it at every turn: in Anne's face, in the way she looked at Colin, the way she spoke to him; in her kindness to him, her tender, quiet absorption. In the way Colin's face turned after her as she came and went; in his restlessness when she was not there; in the peace, the sudden smoothing of his vexed brows, when having gone she came back again.

Supposing it were true that they—

He couldn't bear it to be true; his mind struggled against the truth of it, but if it were true he didn't blame them. So far from being untrue or even improbable, it seemed to Jerrold the most likely thing in the world to have happened. It had happened to so many people since the war that he couldn't deny its likelihood. There was only one thing that could have made it impossible—if Anne had cared for him. And what reason had he to suppose she cared? After six years? After he had told her he was trying to get away from her? He had got away; and he saw a sort of dreadful justice in the event that made it useless for him to come back. If anybody was to blame it was himself. Himself and Queenie, that horrible girl Colin had married.

When he asked himself whether it was the sort of thing that Anne would be likely to do he thought: Why not, if she loved him, if she wanted to make him happy? How could he tell what Anne would or would not do? She had said long ago that he couldn't, that she might do anything.

They spent the evening talking, by fits and starts, with long silences in between. They talked about the things that happened before the war, before Colin's marriage, the things they had done together. They talked about the farm and Anne's work, about Barker and Curtis and Ballinger, about Mrs. Sutton who watched them from her house across the road.

Mrs. Sutton had once been Colin's nurse up at the Manor: she had married old Sutton after his first wife's death; old Sutton who wouldn't die and let Anne have his farm. And now she watched them as if she were afraid of what they might do next.

"Poor old Nanna," Jerrold said.

"Goodness knows what she thinks of us," said Anne.

"It doesn't matter what she thinks," said Colin.

And they laughed; they laughed; and Jerrold was not quite sure, yet.

But before the night was over he thought he was.

They had given him the little room in the gable. It led out of Colin's room. And there on the chimneypiece he saw an old photograph of himself at the age of thirteen, holding a puppy in his arms. He had given it to Anne on the last day of the midsummer holidays, nineteen hundred. Also he found a pair of Anne's slippers under the bed, and, caught in a crack of the dressing-table, one long black hair. This room leading out of Colin's was Anne's room.

And Colin called out to him, "Do you mind leaving the door open, Jerry? I can't sleep if it's shut."

v

It was Jerrold's second day. He and Anne climbed the steep beech walk to the top of the hillock and sat there under the trees. Up the fields on the opposite rise they could see the grey walls and gables of the Manor, and beside it their other beech ring at the top of the last field.

They were silent for a while. He was intensely aware of her as she turned her head round, slowly, to look at him, straight and full.

And the sense of his nearness came over her, soaking in deeper, swamping her brain. Her wide open eyes darkened; her breathing came in tight, short jerks; her nerves quivered. She wondered whether he could feel their quivering, whether he could hear her jerking breath, whether he could see something queer about her eyes. But she had to look at him, not shyly, furtively, but straight and full, taking him in.

He was changed. The war had changed him. His face looked harder, the mouth closer set under the mark of the little clipped fawn-brown moustache. His eyes that used to flash their blue so gayly, to rest so lightly, were fixed now, dark and heavy with memory. They had seen too much. They would never lose that dark memory of the things they had seen. She wondered, was Colin right? Had the war done worse things to Jerrold than it had done to him? He would never tell her.

"Jerrold," she said, suddenly, "did you have a good time in India?"

"I suppose so. I dare say I thought I had."

"And you hadn't?"

"Well, I can't conceive how I could have had."

"You mean it seems so long ago."

"No, I don't mean that."

"You've forgotten."

"I don't mean that, either."

Silence.

"Look here, Anne, I want to know about Colin. Has he been very bad?"

"Yes, he has."

"How bad?"

"So bad that sometimes I was glad you weren't there to see him. You remember when he was a kid, how frightened he used to be at night. Well, he's been like that all the time. He's like that now, only he's a bit better. He doesn't scream now.... All the time he kept on worrying about you. He only told me that the other day. He seemed to think the war must have done something more frightful to you than it had done to him; he said, because you'd mind it more. I told him it wasn't the sort of thing you'd mind most."

"It isn't the sort of thing it's any good minding. I don't suppose I minded more than the other chaps. If anything had happened to you, or him, or Eliot, I'd have minded that."

"I know. That's what I told him. I knew you'd come through."

"Eliot was dead right about Colin. He knew he wouldn't. He ought never to have gone out."

"He wanted so awfully to go. But Eliot could have stopped him if it hadn't been for Queenie. She hunted and hounded him out. She told him he was funking. Fancy Colin funking!"

"What's Queenie like?"

"She's like that. She never funks herself, but she wants to make out that everybody else does."

"Do you like Queenie?"

"No. I hate her. I don't mind her hounding him out so much since she went herself; I do mind her leaving him. Do you know, she's never even tried to come and see him."

"Good God! what a beast the woman must be. What on earth made him marry her?"

"He was frightfully in love. An awful sort of love that wore him out and made him wretched. And now he's afraid for his life of her. I believe he's afraid of the war ending because then she'll come back."

"And if she does come back?"

"She may try and take Colin away from me. But she shan't. She can't take him if he doesn't want to go. She left him to me to look after and I mean to stick to him. I won't have him frightened and made all ill again just when I've got him well."

"I'm afraid you've had a very hard time."

"Not so hard as you think."

She smiled a mysterious, quiet smile, as if she contemplated some happy secret. He thought he knew it, Anne's secret.

"Do you think it's funny of me to be living here with Colin?"

He laughed.

"I suppose it's all right. You always had pluck enough for anything."

"It doesn't take pluck to stick to Colin."

"Moral pluck."

"No. Not even moral."

"You were always fond of him, weren't you?"

That was about as far as he dare go.

She smiled her strange smile again.

"Yes. I was always fond of him.... You see, he wants me more than anybody else ever did or ever will."

"I'm not so sure about that. But he always did get what he wanted."

"Oh, does he! How about Queenie?"

"Even Queenie. I suppose he wanted her at the time."

"He doesn't want her now. Poor Colin."

"You mustn't ask me to pity him."

"Ask you? He'd hate you to pity him. I'd hate you to pity me."

"I shouldn't dream of pitying you, any more than I should dream of criticising you."

"Oh, you may criticise as much as you like."

"No. Whatever you did it would make no difference. I should know it was right because you did it."

"It wouldn't be. I do heaps of wrong things, but this is right."

"I'm sure it is." "Here's Colin," she said.

He had come out to look for them. He couldn't bear to be alone.

vi

Jerrold had gone to Sutton's Farm to say good-bye to their old nurse, Nanny Sutton.

Nanny talked about the war, about the young men who had gone from Wyck and would not come back, about the marvel of Sutton's living on through it all, and he so old and feeble. She talked about Colin and Anne.

"Oh, Master Jerrold," she said, "I do think it's a pity she should be livin' all alone with Mr. Colin like this 'ere."

"They're all right, Nanny. You needn't worry."

"Well—well, Miss Anne was always one to go her own way and make it seem the right way."

"You may be perfectly sure it is the right way."

"I'm not sayin' as 'tisn't. And I dunnow what Master Colin'd a done without her. But it do make people talk. There's a deal of strange things said in the place."

"Don't listen to them."

"Eh dear, I'll not 'ear a word. When anybody says anything to me I tell 'em straight they'd oughter be ashamed of themselves, back-bitin' and slanderin'."

"That's right, Nanny, you give it them in the neck."

"If it'd only end in talk, but there's been harm done to the innocent. There's Mr. and Mrs. Kimber. Kimber, 'e's my 'usband's cousing." Nanny paused.

"What about him?"

"Well, 'tis this way. They're doin' for Miss Anne, livin' in the house with her. Kimber, 'e sees to the garden and Mrs. Kimber she cooks and that. And Kimber—that's my 'usband's cousin—'e was gardener at the vicarage. And now 'e's lost his job along of Master Colin and Miss Anne."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, sir, 'tis the vicar. 'E says they 'adn't oughter be livin' in the house with Miss Anne, because of the talk there's been. So 'e says Kimber must choose between 'em. And Kimber, 'e says 'e'd have minded what parson said if it had a bin a church matter or such like, but parson or no parson, 'e says 'e's his own master an' 'e won't have no interferin' with him and his missus. So he's lost his job."

"Poor old Kimber. What a beastly shame."

"Eh, 'tis a shame to be sure."

"Never mind; I can give him a bigger job at the Manor."

"Oh, Master Jerrold, if you would, it'd be a kindness, I'm sure. And Kimber 'e deserves it, the way they've stuck to Miss Anne."

"He does indeed. It's pretty decent of them. I'll see about that before I go."

"Thank you, sir. Sutton and me thought maybe you'd do something for him, else I shouldn't have spoken. And if there's anything I can do for Miss Anne I'll do it. I've always looked on her as one of you. But 'tis a pity, all the same."

"You mustn't say that, Nanny. I tell you it's all perfectly right."

"Well, I shall never say as 'tisn't. No, nor think it. You can trust me for that, Master Jerrold."

He thought: Poor old Nanny. She lies like a brick.

vii

He said to himself that he would never know the truth about Anne and Colin. If he went to them and asked them he would be no nearer knowing. They would have to lie to him to save each other. In any case, his mother had made it clear to him that as long as Anne had to look after Colin he couldn't ask them. If they were innocent their innocence must be left undisturbed. If they were not innocent, well—he had lost the right to know it. Besides, he was sure, as sure as if they had told him.

He knew how it would be. Colin's wife would come home and she would divorce Colin and he would marry Anne. So far as Jerrold could see, that was his brother's only chance of happiness and sanity.

As for himself, there was nothing he could do now but clear out and leave them.

And, as he had no desire to go back to his mother and hear about Anne and Colin all over again, he went down to the Durhams' in Yorkshire for the rest of his leave.

He hadn't been there five days before he and Maisie were engaged; and before the two weeks were up he had married her.



X

ELIOT

i

Eliot stood in the porch of the Manor Farm house. There was nobody there to greet him. Behind him on the oak table in the hall the wire he had sent lay unopened.

It was midday in June.

All round the place the air was sweet with the smell of the mown hay, and from the Broad Pasture there came the rattle and throb of the mowing-machines.

Eliot went down the road and through the gate into the hay-field. Colin and Anne were there. Anne at the top of the field drove the mower, mounted up on the shell-shaped iron seat, white against the blue sky. Colin at the bottom, slender and tall above the big revolving wheel, drove the rake. The tedding machine, driven by a farm hand, went between. Its iron-toothed rack caught the new-mown hay, tossed it and scattered it on the field. Beside the long glistening swaths the cut edge of the hay stood up clean and solid as a wall. Above it the raised plane of the grass-tops, brushed by the wind, quivered and swayed, whitish green, greenish white, in a long shimmering undulation.

Eliot went on to meet Anne and Colin as they turned and came up the field again.

When they saw him they jumped down and came running.

"Eliot, you never told us."

"I wired at nine this morning."

"There's nobody in the house and we've not been in since breakfast at seven," Colin said.

"It's twelve now. Time you knocked off for lunch, isn't it?"

"Are you all right, Eliot?" said Anne.

"Rather."

He gave a long look at them, at their sun-burnt faces, at their clean, slender grace, Colin in his cricketing flannels, and Anne in her land-girl's white-linen coat, knickerbockers, and grey wideawake.

"Colin doesn't look as if there was much the matter with him. He might have been farming all his life."

"So I have," said Colin; "considering that I haven't lived till now."

And they went back together towards the house.

ii

Colin's and Anne's work was done for the day. The hay in the Broad Pasture was mown and dried. Tomorrow it would be heaped into cocks and carried to the stackyard.

It was the evening of Eliot's first day. He and Anne sat out under the apple trees in the orchard.

"What on earth have you done to Colin?" he said. "I expected to find him a perfect wreck."

"He was pretty bad three months ago. But it's good for him being down here in the place he used to be happy in. He knows he's safe here. It's good for him doing jobs about the farm, too."

"I imagine it's good for him being with you."

"Oh, well, he knows he's safe with me."

"Very safe. He owes it to you that he's sane now. You must have been astonishingly wise with him."

"It didn't take much wisdom. Not more than it used to take when he was a little frightened kid. That's all he was when he came back from the war, Eliot."

"The point is that you haven't treated him like a kid. You've made a man of him again. You've given him a man's life and a man's work."

"That's what I want to do. When he's trained he can look after Jerrold's land. You know poor Barker died last month of septic pneumonia. The camp was full of it."

"I know."

"What do you think of my training Colin?"

"It's all right for him, Anne. But how about you?"

"Me? Oh, I'm all right. You needn't worry about me."

"I do worry about you. And your father's worrying."

"Dear old Daddy. It is silly of him. As if anything mattered but Colin."

"You matter. You see, your father doesn't like your being here alone with him. He's afraid of what people may think."

"I'm not. I don't care what people think. They've no business to."

"No; but they will, and they do...You know what I mean, Anne, don't you?"

"I suppose you mean they think I'm Colin's mistress. Is that it?"

"I'm afraid it is. They can't think anything else. It's beastly of them, I know, but this is a beastly world, dear, and it doesn't do to go on behaving as if it wasn't."

"I don't care. If people are beastly it's their look-out, not mine. The beastlier they are the less I care."

"I don't suppose you care if the vicar's wife won't call or if Lady Corbett and the Hawtreys cut you. But that's why."

"Is it? I never thought about it. I'm too busy to go and see them and I supposed they were too busy to come and see me. I certainly don't care."

"If it was people you cared about?"

"Nobody I care about would think things like that of me."

"Anne dear, I'm not so sure."

"Then it shows how much they care about me."

"But it's because they care."

"I can't help it. They may care, but they don't know. They can't know anything about me if they think that."

"And you honestly don't mind?"

"I mind what you think. But you don't think it, Eliot, do you?"

"I? Good Lord no! Do you mind what mother thinks?"

"Yes, I mind. But it doesn't matter very much."

"It would matter if Jerrold thought it."

"Oh Eliot—does he?"

"I don't suppose he thinks precisely that. But I'm pretty sure he thought you and Colin cared for each other."

"What makes you think so?"

"His marrying Maisie like that."

"Why shouldn't he marry her?"

"Because it's you he cares about."

Eliot's voice was quiet and heavy. She knew that what he said was true. That quiet, heavy voice was the voice of her own innermost conviction. Yet under the shock of it she sat silent, not looking at him, looking with wide, fixed eyes at the pattern the apple boughs made on the sky.

"How do you know?" she said, presently.

"Because of the way he talked to mother before he came to see you here. She says he was frightfully upset when she told him about you and Colin."

"She told him that?"

"Apparently."

"What did she do it for, Eliot?"

"What does mother do anything for? I imagine she wanted to put Jerrold off so that you could stick on with Colin. You've taken him off her hands and she wants him kept off."

"So she told him I was Colin's mistress."

"Mind you, she doesn't think a bit the worse of you for that. She admires you for it no end."

"Do you suppose I care what she thinks? It's her making Jerrold think it...Eliot, how could she?"

"She could, because she only sees things as they affect herself."

"Do you believe she really thinks it?"

"She's made herself think it because she wanted to."

"But why—why should she want to?"

"I've told you why. She's afraid of having to look after Colin. I've no illusions about mother. She's always been like that. She wouldn't see what she was doing to you. Before she did it she'd persuaded herself that it was Colin and not Jerrold that you cared for. And she wouldn't do it deliberately at all. I know it has all the effect of low cunning, but it isn't. It's just one of her sudden movements. She'd rush into it on a blind impulse."

Anne saw it all, she saw that Adeline had slandered her to Jerrold and to Eliot, that she had made use of her love for Colin, which was her love for Jerrold, to betray her; that she had betrayed her to safeguard her own happy life, without pity and without remorse; she had done all of these things and none of them. They were the instinctive movements of her funk. Where Adeline's ease and happiness were concerned she was one incarnate funk. You couldn't think of her as a reasonable and responsible being, to be forgiven or unforgiven.

"It doesn't matter how she did it. It's done now," she said.

"Really, Anne, it was too bad of Colin. He oughtn't to have let you."

"He couldn't help it, poor darling. He wasn't in a state. Don't put that into his head. It just had to happen... I don't care, Eliot. If it was to be done again to-morrow I'd do it. Only, if I'd known, I could have told Jerrold the truth. The others can think what they like. It'll only make me stick to Colin all the more. I promised Jerrold I'd look after him and I shall as long as he wants me. It serves them all right. They all left him to me—Daddy and Aunt Adeline and Queenie, I mean—and they can't stop me now."

"Mother doesn't want to stop you. It's your father."

"I'll write and tell Daddy. Besides, it's too late. If I left Colin to-morrow it wouldn't stop the scandal. My reputation's gone and I can't get it back, can I?"

"Dear Anne, you don't know how adorable you are without it."

"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."

"I care for you a great deal; but not in that sort of way."

"I'm not asking you to care for me in the way you care for Jerrold. You may care for me any way you please if you'll only marry me. You don't know how awfully little I'd be content to take."

"I shouldn't be content to give it, though. You oughtn't to have anything but the best."

"It would be the best for me, you see."

"Oh no, Eliot, it wouldn't. You only think it would because you're an angel. It would be awful of me to give so little when I take such a lot. I know what your loving would be."

"If you know you must have thought of it. And if you've thought of it—"

"I've only thought of it to see how impossible it is. It mightn't be if I could leave off loving Jerrold. But I can't...Eliot, I've got the queerest feeling about him. I know you'll think me mad, when he's gone and married somebody else, but I feel all the time as if he hadn't, as if he belonged to me and always had; and I to him. Whoever Maisie's married it isn't Jerrold. Not the real Jerrold."

"The fact remains that she's married him."

"No. Not him. Only a bit of him. Some bit that doesn't matter."

"Anne darling, I'd try not to think that."

"I don't think it. I feel it. Down there, deep inside me. I've always felt that Jerrold would come back to me and he came back. Then there was Colin. He'll come back again."

"Then there'll be Maisie."

"No, then there won't be Maisie. There won't be anything if he really comes...Now you see how mad I am. Now you see how awful it would be to marry me."

"No, Anne. I see it's the only way to keep you safe."

"Safe from what? Safe from Jerrold? I don't want to be safe from him. Eliot, I'm telling you this because you trust me. I want you to see me as I really am, so that you won't want to marry me any more."

"Ah, that's not the way to make me. Nothing you say makes any difference. Nothing you could do would make any difference."

"Supposing it had been true what your mother said, wouldn't that?"

"No. If you'd given yourself to Colin I should only have thought it was your goodness. It would have been good because you did it."

"How queer. That's what Jerrold said. Then he did love me."

"I told you he loved you."

"Then I don't care. Nothing else matters."

"That's all you have to say to me?"

"Yes. Unless I lie."

"You'd lie for Jerrold."

"For him. Not to him. I should never need to."

"You've no need to lie to me, dear. I know you better than he does. You forget that I didn't think what he thought."

"That only shows that he knew."

"Knew what?"

"What I am. What I might do if I really cared."

"There are things you'd never do. You'd never do anything mean or dishonourable or cruel."

"Oh, you don't know what I'd do...Don't worry, Eliot. I shall be too busy with the land and with Colin to do very much."

"I'm not worrying."

All the same he wondered which of them knew Anne best, he or Anne herself, or Jerrold.



XI

INTERIM

i

Colin thought with terror of the time when Queenie would come back from the war. At any moment she might get leave and come; if she had not had it yet that only made it more likely that she would have it soon.

The vague horror that waited for him every morning had turned into this definite fear of Queenie. He was afraid of her temper, of her voice and eyes, of her crude, malignant thoughts, of her hatred of Anne. More than anything he was afraid of her power over him, of her vehement, exhausting love. He was afraid of her beauty.

One morning, early in September, the wire came. Colin shook with agitation as he read it.

"What is it?" Anne said.

"Queenie. She's got leave. She'll be here today. At four o'clock."

"Don't you want to see her?"

"No, I don't."

"Then you'd better drive over to Kingden and look at those bullocks of Ledbury's."

"I don't know anything about bullocks. They ought to be straight lines from their heads to their tails. That's about all I know."

"Never mind, you'll have gone to look at bullocks. And you can tell Ledbury I'm coming over to-morrow. Do you mind driving yourself?"

Colin did mind. He was afraid to drive by himself; but he was much more afraid of Queenie.

"You can take Harry. And leave me to settle Queenie."

Colin went off with Harry to Chipping Kingden. And at four o'clock Queenie came. Her hard, fierce eyes stared past Anne, looking for Colin.

"Where's Colin?" she said.

"He had to go out, but he'll be back before dinner."

Presently Queenie asked if she might go upstairs. As they went you could see her quick, inquisitive eyes sweeping and flashing.

The door of Colin's room stood open.

"Is that Colin's room?"

"Yes."

She went in, opened the inner door and looked into the gable room.

"Who sleeps here?" she said.

"I do," said Anne.

"You?"

"Have you any objection?"

"You might as well sleep in my husband's room."

"Oh no, this is near enough. I can tell whether he's asleep or awake."

"Can you? And, please, how long has this been going on?"

"I've been sleeping in this room since November. Before that we had our old rooms at the Manor. There was a passage between, you remember. But I left the doors wide open."

"Oh no, this is near enough. I can tell whether he's asleep or awake."

"Can you? And, please, how long has this been going on?"

"I've been sleeping in this room since November. Before that we had our old rooms at the Manor. There was a passage between, you remember. But I left the doors wide open."

"I suppose," said Queenie, with furious calm, "you want me to divorce him?"

"Divorce him? Why on earth should you? Just because I looked after him at night? I had to. There wasn't anybody else. And he was afraid to sleep alone. He is still. But he's all right as long as he knows I'm there."

"You expect me to believe that's all there is in it?"

"No, I don't, considering what your mind's like."

"Oh yes, when people do dirty things it's always other people's dirty minds. Do you imagine I'm a fool, Anne?"

"You're an awful fool if you think Colin's my lover."

"I think it, and I say it."

"If you think it you're a fool. If you say it you're a liar. A damned liar."

"And is Colin's mother a liar, too?"

"Yes, but not a damned one. It would serve you jolly well right, Queenie, if he was my lover, after the way you left him to me."

"I didn't leave him to you. I left him to his mother."

"Anyhow, you left him."

"I couldn't help it. You were not wanted at the front and I was. I couldn't leave hundreds of wounded soldiers just for Colin."

"I had to. He was in an awful state. I've looked after him day and night; I've got him almost well now, and I think the least you can do is to keep quiet and let him alone."

"I shall do nothing of the sort. I shall divorce him as soon as the war's over."

"It isn't over yet. And I don't advise you to try. No decent barrister would touch your case, it's so rotten."

"Not half so rotten as you'll look when it's in all the papers."

"You can't frighten me that way."

"Can't I? I suppose you'll say you were looking, poor darling, if you do bring your silly old action. Only please don't do it till he's quite well, or he'll be ill again...I think that's tea going in. Will you go down?"

They went down. Tea was laid in the big bare hall. The small round oak table brought them close together. Anne waited on Queenie with every appearance of polite attention. Queenie ate and drank in long, fierce silences; for her hunger was even more imperious than her pride.

"I don't want to eat your food," she said at last. "I'm only doing it because I'm starving. I dined with Colin's mother last night. It was the first dinner I've eaten since I went to the war."

"You needn't feel unhappy about it," said Anne. "It's Eliot's house and Jerrold's food. How's Cutler?"

"Much the same as when you saw him." Queenie answered quietly, but her face was red.

"And that Johnnie—what was his name?—who took my place?"

Queenie's flush darkened. She was holding her mouth so tight that the thin red line of the lips faded.

"Noel Fenwick," said Anne, suddenly remembering.

"What about him?" Queenie's throat moved as if she swallowed something big and hard.

"Is he there still?"

"He was when I left."

Her angry, defiant eyes were fixed on the open doorway. You could see she was waiting for Colin, ready to fall on him and tear him as soon as he came in.

"Am I to see Colin or not?" she said as she rose.

"Have you anything to say to him?"

"Only what I've said to you."

"Then you won't see him. In fact I think you'd better not see him at all."

"You mean he funks it?"

"I funk it for him. He isn't well enough to be raged at and threatened with proceedings. It'll upset him horribly and I don't see what good it'll do you."

"No more do I. I'm not going to live with him after this. You can tell him that. Tell him I don't want to see him or speak to him again."

"I see. You just came down to make a row."

"You don't suppose I came down to stay with you two?"

Queenie was so far from coming down to stay that she had taken rooms for the night at the White Hart in Wyck. Anne drove her there.

ii

Two and a half years passed. Anne's work on the farm filled up her days and marked them. Her times were ploughing time and the time for sowing: wheat first, and turnips after the wheat, barley after the turnips, sainfoin, grass and clover after the barley. Oats in the five-acre field this year; in the seven-acre field the next. Lambing time, calving time, cross-ploughing and harrowing, washing and shearing time, time for hoeing; hay time and harvest. Then threshing time and ploughing again.

All summer the hard fight against the charlock, year after year the same. You harrowed it out and ploughed it down and sprayed it with sulphate of copper; you sowed vetches and winter corn to crowd it out; and always it sprang up again, flaring in bright yellow stripes and fans about the hills. The air was sweet with its smooth, delicious smell.

Always the same clear-cut pattern of the fields; but the colors shifted. The slender, sharp-pointed triangle that was jade-green last June, this June was yellow-brown. The square under the dark comb of the plantation that had been yellow-brown was emerald; the wide-open fan beside it that had been emerald was pink. By August the emerald had turned to red-gold and the jade-green to white.

These changes marked the months and the years, a bright patterned, imperceptibly moving measure, rolling time off across the hills.

Nineteen-sixteen, seventeen. Nineteen-eighteen and the armistice. Nineteen-nineteen and the peace.

iii

In the spring of that year Anne and Colin were still together at the Manor Farm. He was stronger. But, though he did more and more work every year, he was still unfit to take over the management himself. Responsibility fretted him and he tired soon. He could do nothing without Anne.

He was now definitely separated from his wife. Queenie had come back from the war a year ago. As soon as it was over she had begun to rage and consult lawyers and write letters two or three times a week, threatening to drag Anne and Colin through the Divorce Court. But Miss Mullins (once the secretary of Dr. Cutler's Field Ambulance Corps), recovering at the Farm from an excess of war work, reassured them. Queenie, she said, was only bluffing. Queenie was not in a position to bring an action against any husband, she had been too notorious herself. Miss Mullins had seen things, and she intimated that no defence could stand against the evidence she could give.

And in the end Queenie left off talking about divorce and contented herself with a judicial separation.

Colin still woke every morning to his dread of some blank, undefined disaster; but, as if Queenie and the war had made one obsession, he was no longer haunted by the imminent crash of phantom shells. It was settled that he was to live with Jerrold and Maisie when they came back to the Manor, while Anne stayed on by herself at the Farm.

Every now and then Eliot came down to see them. He had been sent home early in nineteen-seventeen with a shrapnel wound in his left leg, the bone shattered. He obtained his discharge at the price of a permanent limp, and went back to his research work.

For the last two years he had been investigating trench fever, with results that were to make him famous. But that was not for another year.

In February, nineteen-nineteen, Jerrold had come back. He and Maisie had been living in London ever since he had left the Army, filling in time till Wyck Manor would be no longer a Home for Convalescent Soldiers. He had tried to crowd into this interval all the amusement he hadn't had for four years. His way was to crush down the past with the present; to pile up engagements against the future, party on party, dances on suppers and suppers on plays; to dine every evening at some place where they hadn't dined before; to meet lots of nice amusing people with demobilised minds who wouldn't talk to him about the war; to let himself go in bursts of exquisitely imbecile laughter; never to be quiet for an hour, never to be alone with himself, never to be long alone with Maisie.

After the first week of it this sort of thing ceased to amuse him, but he went on with it because he thought it amused Maisie.

There was something he missed; something he wanted and hadn't got. At night, when he lay awake, alone with himself at last, he knew that it was Anne.

And he went on laughing and amusing Maisie; and Maisie, with a heart-breaking sweetness, laughed back at him and declared herself amused. She had never had such a jolly time in all her life, she said.

Then, very early in the spring, Maisie went down to her people in Yorkshire to recover from the jolly time she had had. The convalescent soldiers had all gone, and Wyck Manor, rather worn and shabby, was Wyck Manor again.

Jerrold came back to it alone.



XII

COLIN, JERROLD, AND ANNE

i

He went through the wide empty house, looking through all the rooms, trying to find some memory of the happiness he had had there long ago. The house was full of Anne. Anne's figure crossed the floors before him, her head turned over her shoulder to see if he were coming; her voice called to him from the doorways, her running feet sounded on the stairs. That was her place at the table; that was the armchair she used to curl up in; just there, on the landing, he had kissed her when he went to school.

They had given his mother's room to Maisie, and they had put his things into the room beyond, his father's room. Everything was in its place as it had been in his father's time, the great wardrobe, the white marble-topped washstand, the bed he had died on. He saw him lying there and Anne going to and fro between the washstand and the bed. The parrot curtains hung from the windows, straight and still.

Jerrold shuddered as he looked at these things.

They had thought that he would want to sleep in that room because he was married, because Maisie would have the room it led out of.

But he couldn't sleep in it. He couldn't stay in it a minute; he would never pass its door without that sickening pang of memory. He moved his things across the gallery into Anne's room.

He would sleep there; he would sleep in the white bed that Anne had slept in.

He told himself that he had to be near Colin; there was only the passage between and their doors could stand open; that was why he wanted to sleep there. But he knew that was not why. He wanted to sleep there because there was no other room where he could feel Anne so near him, where he could see her so clearly. When the dawn came she would be with him, sitting in her chair by the window. The window looked to the west, to Upper Speed and the Manor Farm house. The house was down there behind the trees, and somewhere there, jutting out above the porch, was the window of Anne's room.

He looked at his watch. One o'clock. At two he would go and see Anne.

ii

When Jerrold called at the Manor Farm house Anne was out. Old Ballinger came slouching up from the farmyard to tell him that Miss Anne had gone up to the Far Acres field to try the new tractor.

The Far Acres field lay at the western end of the estate. Jerrold followed her there. Five furrows, five bright brown bands on the sallow stubble, marked out the Far Acres into five plots. In the turning space at the top corner he saw Anne on her black horse and Colin standing beside her.

With a great clanking and clanging the new American, tractor struggled towards them up the hill, dragging its plough. It stopped and turned at the "headland" as Jerrold came up.

A clear, light wind blew over the hill and he felt a sudden happiness and excitement. He was beginning to take an interest in his land. He shouted:

"I say, Anne, you look like Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo."

"Oh, not Waterloo, I hope. I'm going to win my battle."

"Well, Marengo—Austerlitz—whatever battles he did win. Does Curtis understand that infernal thing?"

Young Curtis, sulky and stolid on his driver's seat, stared at his new master.

"Yes. He's been taught motor mechanics. He's quite good at it ... If only he'd do what you tell him. Curtis, I said you were not to use those disc coulters for this field. I've had three smashed in two weeks. They're no earthly good for stony soil."

"Tis n' so bad 'ere as it is at the east end, miss."

"Well, we'll see. You can let her go now."

With a fearful grinding and clanking the tractor started. The revolving disc coulter cut the earth; the three great shares gripped it and turned it on one side. But the earth, instead of slanting off clear from the furrows, fell back again. Anne dismounted and ran after the tractor and stopped it.

"He hasn't got his plough set right," she said. "It's too deep in."

She stooped, and did something mysterious and efficient with a lever; the wheels dipped, raising the shares to their right level, and the tractor set off again. This time the earth parted clean from the furrows with the noise of surge, and three slanting, glistening waves ran the length of the field in the wake of the triple plough.

"Oh, Jerrold, look at those three lovely furrows. Look at the pace it goes. This field will be ploughed up in a day or two. Colin, aren't you pleased?"

The tractor was coming towards them, making a most horrible noise.

"No," he said, "I don't like the row it makes. Can't I go, now I've seen what the beastly thing can do?"

"Yes. You'd better go if you can't stand it."

Colin went with quick, desperate strides down the field away from the terrifying sound of the tractor.

They looked after him sorrowfully.

"He's not right yet. I don't think he'll ever be able to stand noises."

"You must give him time, Anne."

"Time? He's had three years. It's heart-breaking. I must just keep him out of the way of the tractors, that's all."

She mounted her horse and went riding up and down the field, abreast of the plough.

Jerrold waited for her at the gate of the field.

iii

It was Sunday evening between five and six.

Anne was in the house, in the great Jacobean room on the first floor. Barker had judged it too large and too dilapidated to live in, and it had been left empty in his time. Eliot had had it restored and Jerrold had furnished it. Black oak bookcases from the Manor stretched along the walls, for Jerrold had given Eliot half of their father's books. This room would be too dilapidated to live in, and it had been left empty in his time. Eliot had had it restored and Jerrold had furnished it. Black oak bookcases from the Manor stretched along the walls, for Jerrold had given Eliot half of their father's books. This room would be Eliot's library when he came down. It was now Anne's sitting-room.

The leaded windows were thrown open to the grey evening and a drizzling rain; but a fire blazed on the great hearth under the arch of the carved stone chimney-piece. Anne's couch was drawn up before it. She lay stretched out on it, tired with her week's work.

She was all alone in the house. The gardener and his wife went out together every Sunday to spend the evening with their families at Medlicote or Wyck. She was not sorry when they were gone; the stillness of the house rested her. But she missed Colin. Last Sunday he had been there, sitting beside her in his chair by the hearth, reading. Today he was with Jerrold at the Manor. The soft drizzle turned to a quick patter of rain; a curtain of rain fell, covering the grey fields between the farm and the Manor, cutting her off.

She was listening to the rain when she heard the click of the gate and feet on the garden path. They stopped on the flagstones under her window. Jerrold's voice called up to her.

"Anne—Anne, are you there? Can I come up?"

"Rather."

He came rushing up the stairs. He was in the room now.

"How nice of you to come on this beastly evening."

"That's why I came. I thought it would be so rotten for you all alone down here."

"What have you done with Colin?"

"Left him up there. He was making no end of a row on the piano."

"Oh Jerrold, if he's playing again he'll be all right."

"He didn't sound as if there was much the matter with him."

"You never can tell. He can't stand those tractors."

"We must keep him away from the beastly things. I suppose we've got to have 'em?"

"I'm afraid so. They save no end of labour, and labour's short and dear."

"Is that why you've been working yourself to death?"

"I haven't. Why, do I look dead?"

"No. Eliot told me. He saw you at it."

"I only take a hand at hay time and harvest. All the rest of the year it's just riding about and seeing that other people work. And Colin does half of that now."

"All the same, I think it's about time you stopped."

"But if I stop the whole thing'll stop. The men must have somebody over them."

"There's me."

"You don't know anything about farming, Jerry dear. You don't know a teg from a wether."

"I suppose I can learn if Colin's learnt. Or I can get another Barker."

"Not so easy. Don't you like my looking after your land, then? Aren't you pleased with me? I haven't done so badly, you know. Seven hundred acres."

"You've been simply splendid. I shall never forget what you've done. And I shall never forgive myself for letting you do it. I'd no idea what it meant."

"It's only meant that Colin's better and I've been happier than I ever thought I could have been."

"Happier? Weren't you happy then?"

She didn't answer. They were on dangerous ground. If they began talking about happiness—

"If I gave it up to-morrow," she said, "I should only go and work on another farm."

"Would you?"

"Jerrold—do you want me to go?"

"Want you?"

"Yes. You did once. At least, you wanted to get away from me."

"I didn't know what I was doing. If I had known I shouldn't have done it. I can't talk about that, Anne. It doesn't bear thinking about."

"No. But, Jerrold—tell me the truth. Do you want me to go because of Colin?"

"Colin?"

"Yes. Because of what your mother told you?"

"How do you know what she told me?"

"She told Eliot."

"And he told you? Good God! what was he thinking of?"

"He thought it better for me to know it. It was better."

"How could it be?"

"I can't tell you...Jerrold, it isn't true."

"I know it isn't."

"But you thought it was."

"When did I think?"

"Then; when you came to see me."

"Did I?"

"Yes. And you're not going to lie about it now."

"Well, if I did I've paid for it."

(What did he mean? Paid for it? It was she who had paid.)

"When did you know it wasn't true?" she said.

"Three months after, when Eliot wrote and told me. It was too late then.... If only you'd told me at the time. Why didn't you?"

"But I didn't know you thought it. How could I know?"

"No. How could you? Who would have believed that things could have happened so damnably as that?"

"But it's all right now. Why did you say it was too late?"

"Because it was too late. I was married."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that I lied when I told you it made no difference. It made that difference. If I hadn't thought that you and Colin were...if I hadn't thought that, I wouldn't have married Maisie. I'd have married you."

"Don't say that, Jerrold."

"Well—you asked for the truth, and there it is."

She got up and walked away from him to the window. He followed her there. She spread out her hands to the cold rain.

"It's raining still," she said.

He caught back her hands.

"Would you have married me?"

"Don't, Jerrold, don't. It's cruel of you."

He was holding her by her hands.

"Would you? Tell me. Tell me."

"Let go my hands, then."

He let them go. They turned back to the fireplace. Anne shivered. She held herself to the warmth.

"You haven't told me," he said.

"No, I haven't told you," she repeated, stupidly.

"That's because you would. That's because you love me. You do love me."

"I've always loved you."

She spoke as if from some far-off place; as if the eternity of her love removed her from him, put her beyond his reach.

"But—what's the good of talking about it?" she said.

"All the good in the world. We owed each other the truth. We know it now; we know where we are. We needn't humbug ourselves and each other any more. You see what comes of keeping back the truth. Look how we've had to pay for it. You and me. Would you rather go on thinking I didn't care for you?"

"No, Jerrold, no. I'm only wondering what we're to do next."

"Next?"

"Yes. That's why you want me to go away."

"It isn't. It's why I want you to stay. I want you to leave off working and do all the jolly things we used to do."

"You mustn't make me leave off working. It's my only chance."

They turned restlessly from the fireplace to the couch. They sat one at each end of it, still for a long time, without speaking. The fire died down. The evening darkened in the rain. The twilight came between them, poignant and disquieting, dimming their faces, making them strange and wonderful to each other. Their bodies loomed up through it, wonderful and strange. The high white stone chimney-piece glimmered like an arch into some inner place.

Outside, from the church below the farm house, the bell tinkled for service.

It ceased.

Suddenly they rose and he came towards her to take her in his arms. She beat down his hands and hung on them, keeping him off.

"Don't, Jerry, please, please don't hold me."

"Oh Anne, let me. You let me once. Don't you remember?"

"We can't now. We mustn't."

And yet she knew that it would happen in some time, in some way. But not now. Not like this.

"We mustn't."

"Don't you want me to take you in my arms?"

"No. Not that."

"What, then?" He pressed tighter.

"I want you not to hurt Maisie."

"It's too late to think of Maisie now."

"I'm not thinking of her. I'm thinking of you. You'll hurt yourself frightfully if you hurt her." She wrenched his hands apart and went from him to the door.

"What are you going to do?" he said.

"I'm going to fetch the lamp."

She left him standing there.

A few minutes later she came back carrying the lighted lamp. He took it from her and set it on the table.

"And now?"

"Now you're going back to Colin. And we're both going to be good...You do want to be good—don't you?"

"Yes. But I don't see how we're going to manage it."

"We could manage it if we didn't see each other. If I went away."

"Anne, you wouldn't. You can't mean that. I couldn't stand not seeing you. You couldn't stand it, either."

"I have stood it. I can stand it again."

"You can't. Not now. It's all different. I swear I'll be decent. I won't say another word if only you won't go."

"I don't see how I can very well. There's the land... No. Colin must look after that. I'll go when the ploughing's done. And some day you'll be glad I went."

"Go. Go. You'll find out then."

Their tenderness was over. Something hard and defiant had come in to them with the light. He was at the door now.

"And you'll come back," he said. "You'll see you'll come back."



XIII

ANNE AND JERROLD

i

When he was gone she turned on herself in fury. What had she done it for? Why had she let him go? She didn't want to be good. She wanted nothing in the world but Jerrold.

She hadn't done it for Maisie. Maisie was nothing to her. A woman she had never seen and didn't want to see. She knew nothing of her but her name, and that was sweet and vague like a perfume coming from some place unknown. She had no sweet image of Maisie in her mind. Maisie might never have existed for all that Anne thought about her.

What did she do it for, then? Why didn't she take him when he gave himself? When she knew that in the end it must come to that?

As far as she could see through her darkness it was because she knew that Jerrold had not meant to give himself when he came to her. She had driven him to it. She had made him betray his secret when she asked for the truth. At that moment she was the stronger; she had him at a disadvantage. She couldn't take him like that, through the sudden movement of his weakness. Before she surrendered she must know first whether Jerrold's passion for her was his weakness or his strength. Jerrold didn't know yet. She must give him time to find out.

But before all she had been afraid that if Jerrold hurt Maisie he would hurt himself. She must know which was going to hurt him more, her refusal or her surrender. If he wanted "to be good" she must go away and give him his chance.

And before the ploughing was all over she had gone.

She went down into Essex, to see how her own farm was getting on. The tenant who had the house wanted to buy it when his three years' lease was up. Anne had decided that she would let him. The lease would be up in June. Her agent advised her to sell what was left of the farm land for building, which was what Anne had meant to do. She wanted to get rid of the whole place and be free. All this had to be looked into.

She had not been gone from Jerrold a week before the torture of separation became unbearable. She had said that she could bear it because she had borne it before, but, as Jerrold had pointed out to her, it wasn't the same thing now. There was all the difference in the world between Jerrold's going away from her because he didn't want her, and her going away from Jerrold because he did. It was the difference between putting up with a dull continuous pain you had to bear, and enduring a sharp agony you could end at any minute. Before, she had only given up what she couldn't get; now, she was giving up what she could have to-morrow by simply going back to Wyck.

She loathed the flat Essex country and the streets of little white rough cast and red-tiled houses on the Ilford side where the clear fields had once lain beyond the tall elm rows. She was haunted by the steep, many-coloured pattern of the hills round Wyck, and the grey gables of the Manor. Love-sickness and home-sickness tore at her together till her heart felt as if it were stretched out to breaking point.

She had only to go back and she would end this pain. Then on the sixth day Jerrold's wire came: "Colin ill again. Please come back. Jerrold."

ii

It was not her fault and it was not Jerrold's. The thing had been taken out of their hands. She had not meant to go and Jerrold had not meant to send for her. Colin must have made him. They had lost each other through Colin and now it was Colin who had brought them together.

Colin's terror had come again. Again he had the haunting fear of the tremendous rushing noise, the crash always about to come that never came. He slept in brief fits and woke screaming.

Eliot had been down to see him and had gone. And again, as before, nobody could do anything with him but Anne.

"I couldn't," Jerrold said, "and Eliot couldn't. Eliot made me send for you."

They had left Colin upstairs and were together in the drawing-room. He stood in the full wash of the sunlight that flooded in through the west window. It showed his face drawn and haggard, and discoloured, as though he had come through a long illness. His mouth was hard with pain. He stared away from her with heavy, wounded eyes. She looked at him and was frightened.

"Jerrold, have you been ill?"

"No. What makes you think so?"

"You look ill. You look as if you hadn't slept for ages."

"I haven't. I've been frightfully worried about Colin."

"Have you any idea what set him off again?"

"I believe it was those infernal tractors. He would go out with them after you'd left. He said he'd have to, as long as you weren't there. And he couldn't stand the row. Eliot said it would be that. And the responsibility, the feeling that everything depended on him."

"I see. I oughtn't to have left him."

"It looks like it."

"What else did Eliot say?"

"Oh, he thinks perhaps he might be better at the Farm than up here. He thinks it's bad for him sleeping in that room where he was frightened when he was a kid. He says it all hooks on to that. What's more, he says he may go on having these relapses for years. Any noise or strain or excitement'll bring them on. Do you mind his being at the Farm again?"

"Mind? Of course I don't. If I'm to look after him and the land it'll be very much easier there than here."

For every night at Colin's bedtime Anne came up to the Manor. She slept in the room that was to be Maisie's. When Colin screamed she went to him and sat with him till he slept again. In the morning she went back to the Farm.

She had been doing this for a week now, and Colin was better.

But he didn't want to go back. If, he said, Jerrold didn't mind having him.

Jerrold wanted to know why he didn't want to go back and Colin told him.

"Hasn't it occurred to you that I've hurt Anne enough without beginning all over again? All these damned people here think I'm her lover."

"You can't help that. You're not the only one that's hurt her. We must try and make it up to her, that's all."

"How are we going to do it?"

"My God! I don't know. I shall begin by cutting the swine who've cut her."

"That's no good. She doesn't care if they do cut her. She only cares about us. She's done everything for us, and among us all we've done nothing for her. Absolutely nothing. We can't give her anything. We haven't got anything to give her that she wants."

Jerrold was silent.

Presently he said, "She wants Sutton's farm. Sutton's dying. I shall give it to her when he's dead."

"You think that'll make up?"

"No, Colin, I don't. Supposing we don't talk about it any more."

"All right. I say, when's Maisie coming home?"

"God only knows. I don't."

He wondered how much Colin knew.

iii

February had gone. They were in the middle of March, and still Maisie had not come back.

She wrote sweet little letters to him saying she was sorry to be so long away, but her mother wanted her to stay on another week. When Jerrold wrote asking her to come back (he did this so that he might feel that he had really played the game) she answered that they wouldn't let her go till she was rested, and she wasn't quite rested yet. Jerrold mustn't imagine she was the least bit ill, only rather tired after the winter's racketing. It would be heavenly to see him again.

Then when she was rested her mother got ill and she had to go with her to Torquay. And at Torquay Maisie stayed on and on.

And Jerrold didn't imagine she had been the least bit ill, or even very tired, or that Lady Durham was ill. He preferred to think that Maisie stayed away because she wanted to, because she cared about her people more than she cared about him. The longer she stayed the more obstinately he thought it. Here was he, trying to play the game, trying to be decent and keep straight, and there was Maisie leaving him alone with Anne and making it impossible for him.

Anne had been back at the Farm a week and he had not been to see her. But Maisie's last letter made him wonder whether, really, he need try any more. He was ill and miserable. Why should he make himself ill and miserable for a woman who didn't care whether he was ill and miserable or not? Why shouldn't he go and see Anne? Maisie had left him to her.

And on Sunday morning, suddenly, he went.

There had been a sharp frost overnight. Every branch and twig, every blade of grass, every crinkle in the road was edged with a white fur of rime. It crackled under his feet. He drank down the cold, clean air like water. His whole body felt cold and clean. He was aware of its strength in the hard tension of his muscles as he walked. His own movement exhilarated and excited him. He was going to see Anne.

Anne was not in the house. He went through the yards looking for her. In the stockyard he met her coming up from the sheepfold, carrying a young lamb in her arms. She smiled at him as she came.

She wore her farm dress, knee breeches and a thing like an old trench coat, and looked superb. She went bareheaded. Her black hair was brushed up from her forehead and down over her ears, the length of it rolled in on itself in a curving mass at the back. Over it the frost had raised a crisp web of hair that covered its solid smoothness like a net. Anne's head was the head of a hunting Diana; it might have fitted into the sickle moon.

The lamb's queer knotted body was like a grey ligament between its hind and fore quarters. It rested on Anne's arms, the long black legs dangling. The black-faced, hammer-shaped head hung in the hollow of her elbow.

"This is Colin's job," she said.

"What are you doing with it?"

"Taking it indoors to nurse it. It's been frozen stiff, poor darling. Do you mind looking in the barn and seeing if you can find some old sacks there?"

He looked, found the sacks and carried them, following her into the kitchen. Anne fetched a piece of old blanket and wrapped the lamb up. They made a bed of the sacks before the fire and laid it on it. She warmed some milk, dipped her fingers in it and put them into the lamb's mouth to see if it would suck.

"I didn't know they'd do that," he said.

"Oh, they'll suck anything. When you've had them a little time they'll climb into your lap like puppies and suck the buttons on your coat. Its mother's dead and we shall have to bring it up by hand."

"I doubt if you will."

"Oh yes, I shall save it. It can suck all right. You might tell Colin about it. He looks after the sick lambs."

She got up and stood looking down at the lamb tucked in its blanket, while Jerrold looked at her. When she looked down Anne's face was divinely tender, as if all the love in the world was in her heart. He loved to agony that tender, downward-looking face.

She raised her eyes and saw his fixed on her, heavy and wounded, and his face strained and drawn with pain. And again she was frightened.

"Jerrold, you are ill. What is it?"

"Don't. They'll hear us." He glanced at the open door.

"They can't. He's in church and she's upstairs in the bedrooms."

"Can't you leave that animal and come somewhere where we can talk?"

"Come, then."

He followed her out through the hall and into the small, oak-panelled dining-room. They sat down there in chairs that faced each other on either side of the fireplace.

"What is it?" she repeated. "Have you got a pain?"

"A beastly pain."

"How long have you had it?"

"Ever since you went away. I lied when I told you it was Colin. It isn't."

"What is it, then? Tell me. Tell me."

"It's not seeing you. It's this insane life we're leading. It's making me ill. You don't know what it's been like. And I can't keep my promise. I—I love you too damnably."

"Oh, Jerrold—does it hurt as much as that?"

"You know how it hurts."

"I don't want you to be hurt——But—darling—if you care for me like that how could you marry Maisie?"

"Because I cared for you. Because I was so mad about you that nothing mattered. I thought I might as well marry her as not."

"But if you didn't care for her?"

"I did. I do, in a way. Maisie's awfully sweet. Besides, it wasn't that. You see, I was going out to France, and I thought I was bound to be killed. Nobody could go on having the luck I'd had. I wanted to be killed."

"So you were sure it would happen. You always thought things would happen if you wanted them."

"I was absolutely sure. I was never more sold in my life than when it didn't. Even then I thought it would be all right till Eliot told me. Then I knew that if I hadn't been in such a damned hurry I might have married you."

"Poor Maisie."

"Poor Maisie. But she doesn't know. And if she did I don't think she'd mind much. I married her because I thought she cared about me—and because I thought I'd be killed before I could come back to her—But she doesn't care a damn. So you needn't bother about Maisie. And you won't go away again?"

"I won't go away as long as you want me."

"That's all right then."

He looked at his watch.

"I must be off. They'll be coming out of church. I don't want them to see me here now because I'm coming back in the evening. We shall have to be awfully careful how we see each other. I say—I may come this evening, mayn't I?"

"Yes."

"Same time as last Sunday? You'll be alone then?"

"Yes." Her voice sounded as if it didn't belong to her. As if some other person stronger than she, were answering for her.

When he had gone she called after him.

"Don't forget to tell Colin about the lamb."

She went upstairs and slipped off her farm clothes and put on the brown-silk frock she had worn when he last came to her. She looked in the glass and was glad that she was beautiful.

iv

She began to count the minutes and the hours till Jerrold came. Dinner time passed.

All afternoon she was restless and excited. She wandered from room to room, as if she were looking for something she couldn't find. She went to and fro between the dining-room and kitchen to see how the lamb was getting on. Wrapped in its blanket, it lay asleep after its meal of milk. Its body was warm to the touch and under its soft ribs she could feel the beating of its heart. It would live.

Two o'clock. She took up the novel she had been reading before Jerrold had come and tried to get back into it. Ten minutes passed. She had read through three pages without taking in a word. Her mind went back and back to Jerrold, to the morning of today, to the evening of last Sunday, going over and over the things they had said to each other; seeing Jerrold again, with every movement, every gesture, the sudden shining and darkening of his eyes, and his tense drawn look of pain. How she must have hurt him!

It was his looking at her like that, as if she had hurt him—Anne never could hold out against other people's unhappiness.

Half past two.

She kicked off her shoes, put on her thick boots and her coat, and walked two miles up the road towards Medlicote, for no reason but that she couldn't sit still. It was not four o'clock when she got back. She went into the kitchen and looked at the lamb again.

She thought: Supposing Colin comes down to see it when Jerrold's here? But he wouldn't come. Jerrold would take care of that. Or supposing the Kimbers stayed in? They wouldn't. They never did. And if they did, why not? Why shouldn't Jerrold come to see her?

Four o'clock struck. She had the fire lit in the big upstairs sitting-room. Tea was brought to her there. Mrs. Kimber glanced at her where she lay back on the couch, her hands hanging loose in her lap.

"You're tired after all your week's work, miss?"

"A little."

"And I dare say you miss Mr. Colin?"

"Yes, I miss him very much."

"No doubt he'll be coming down to see the lamb."

"Oh yes; he'll want to see the lamb."

"And you're sure you don't mind me and Kimber going out, miss?"

"Not a bit. I like you to go."

"It's a wonder to me," said Mrs. Kimber, "as you're not afraid to be left alone in this 'ere house. But Kimber says, Miss Anne, she isn't afraid of nothing. And I don't suppose you are, what with going out to the war and all."

"There's not much to be afraid of here."

"That there isn't. Not unless 'tis people's nasty tongues."

"They don't frighten me, Mrs. Kimber."

"No, miss. I should think not indeed. And no reason why they should."

And Mrs. Kimber left her.

A sound of pails clanking came from the yard. That was Minchin, the cow man, going from the dairy to the cow sheds. Milking time, then. It must be half past four.

Five o'clock, the slamming of the front door, the click of the gate, and the Kimbers' voices in the road below as they went towards Wyck.

Anne was alone.

Only half an hour and Jerrold would be with her. The beating of her heart was her measure of time now. What would have happened before he had gone again? She didn't know. She didn't try to know. It was enough that she knew herself, and Jerrold; that she hadn't humbugged herself or him, pretending that their passion was anything but what it was. She saw it clearly in its reality. They couldn't go on as they were. In the end something must happen. They were being drawn to each other, irresistibly, inevitably, nearer and nearer, and Anne knew that a moment would come when she would give herself to him. But that it would come today or to-morrow or at any fore-appointed time she did not know. It would come, if it came at all, when she was not looking for it. She had no purpose in her, no will to make it come.

She couldn't think. It was no use trying to. The thumping of her heart beat down her thoughts. Her brain swam in a warm darkness. Every now and then names drifted to her out of the darkness: Colin—Eliot—Maisie.

Maisie. Only a name, a sound that haunted her always, like a vague, sweet perfume from an unknown place. But it forced her to think.

What about Maisie? It would have been awful to take Jerrold away from Maisie, if she cared for him. But she wasn't taking him away. She couldn't take away what Maisie had never had. And Maisie didn't care for Jerrold; and if she didn't care she had no right to keep him. She had nothing but her legal claim.

Besides, what was done was done. The sin against Maisie had been committed already in Jerrold's heart when it turned from her. Whatever happened, or didn't happen, afterwards, nothing could undo that. And Maisie wouldn't suffer. She wouldn't know. Her thoughts went out again on the dark flood. She couldn't think any more.

Half past five.

She started up at the click of the gate. That was Jerrold.

v

He came to her quickly and took her in his arms. And her brain was swamped again with the warm, heavy darkness. She could feel nothing but her pulses beating, beating against his, and the quick droning of the blood in her ears. Her head was bent to his breast; he stooped and kissed the nape of her neck, lightly, brushing the smooth, sweet, roseleaf skin. They stood together, pressed close, closer, to each other. He clasped his hands at the back of her head and drew it to him. She leaned it hard against the clasping hands, tilting it so that she saw his face, before it stooped again, closing down on hers.