t. You didn't. I wanted you and I made you come to me. And I
knew what it would be like and you didn't."

"Nobody could have known. Don't go back on it."

"I'm not going back on it. If only I'd never seen Maisie--then I
wouldn't have cared. We could have gone on."

"Do you mean we can't now?"

"Yes. How can we when she's such an angel to us and trusts us so?"

"It does make it pretty beastly," he said.

"It makes me feel absolutely rotten."

"So it does me, when I think about it."

"It's knowing her, Jerry. It's having to love her, and knowing that she
loves me; it's knowing what she is.... Why did you make me see her?"

"You know why."

"Yes. Because it made it safer. That's the beastliness of it. I knew how
it would be. I knew she'd beat us in the end--with her goodness."

"Darling, it _isn't_ your fault."

"It _is_. It's all my fault. I'm not going back on it. I'd do it again
to-morrow if it weren't for Maisie. Even now I don't know whether it's
right or wrong. I only know it's the most real and valuable part of me
that loves you, and it's the most real and valuable part of you that
loves me; and I feel somehow that that makes it right. I'd go on with it
if it made you happy. But you aren't happy now."

"I'm not happy because you're not. I don't mind for myself so much. Only
I hate the beastly way we've got to do it. Covering it all up and
pretending that we're not lovers. Deceiving her. That's what makes it
all wrong. Hiding it."

"I know. And I made you do that."

"You didn't. We did it for Maisie. Anyhow, we must stop it. We can't go
on like this any more. We must simply tell her."

"_Tell_ her?"

"Yes; tell her, and get her to divorce me, so that I can marry you. It's
the only straight thing."

"How can we? It would hurt her so awfully."

"Not so much as you think. Remember, she doesn't care for me. She's not
like you, Anne. She's frightfully cold."

As he said it there came to her a sudden awful intimation of reality, a
sense that behind all their words, all the piled-up protection of their
outward thinking, there hid an unknown certainty, a certainty that would
wreck them if they knew it. It was safer not to know, to go on hiding
behind those piled-up barriers of thought. But an inward, ultimate
honesty drove her to her questioning.

"Are you sure she's cold?"

"Absolutely sure. You go on thinking all the time that she's like you,
that she takes things as hard as you do; but she does