He was silent for a second.

"Anne--she's beaten us. We can't tell her now."

"No. And we can't go on. If we can't be straight about it we've got to
give each other up."

"I know. We can't go on. There's nothing more to be said."

His voice dropped on her aching heart with the toneless weight of
finality.

"We've got to end it now, this minute," she said. "Don't come any
farther."

"Let me go to the bottom of the field."

"No. I'm not going that way."

He had come close to her now, close, as though he would have taken her
in his arms for the last night, the last time. He wanted to touch her,
to hold her back from the swallowing darkness. But she moved out of his
reach and he did not follow her. His passion was ready to flame up if he
touched her, and he was afraid. They must end it clean, without a word
or a touch.

The grass drive between the firs led to a gate on the hill road that
skirted the Manor fields. He knew that she would go from him that way,
because she didn't want to pass by their shelter at the bottom. She
couldn't sleep in it tonight.

He stood still and watched her go, her white coat glimmering in the
darkness between the black rows of firs. The white gate glimmered at the
end of the drive. She stood there a moment. He saw her slip like a white
ghost between the gate and the gate post; he heard the light thud of the
wooden latch falling back behind her, and she was gone.

XVII

JERROLD, MAISIE, ANNE, ELIOT

i

Maisie lay in bed, helpless and abandoned to her illness. It was no good
trying to cover it up and hide it any more. Jerrold knew.

The night when he left Anne he had gone up to Maisie in her room. He
couldn't rest unless he knew that she was all right. He had stooped over
her to kiss her and she had sat up, holding her face to him, her hands
clasped round his neck, drawing him close to her, when suddenly the pain
gripped her and she lay back in his arms, choking, struggling for
breath.

Jerrold thought she was dying. He waited till the pain passed and she
was quieted, then he ran downstairs and telephoned for Ransome. He
looked on in agony while Ransome's stethoscope wandered over Maisie's
thin breast and back. It seemed to him that Ransome was taking an
unusually long time about it, that he must be on the track of some
terrible discovery. And when Ransome took the tubes from his ears and
said, curtly, "Heart quite sound; nothing wrong there," he was convinced
that Ran