."

"I haven't. I'm going because I care. I can't let Jerry go on like that.
I've got to end it."

"You're going simply to save Jerrold. So that you can never go back to
him. Don't you see that if you married me you'd both be safe? You
couldn't go back. If you were married to me Jerrold wouldn't take you
from me. If you were married to me you wouldn't break faith with me. If
you had children you wouldn't break faith with them. Nothing could keep
you safer."

"I can't, Eliot. Nothing's changed. I belong to Jerrold. I always have
belonged to him. It isn't anything physical. Even if I'm separated from
him, thousands of miles, I shall belong to him still. My mind, or soul,
or whatever the thing is, can't get away from him.... You say if I
belonged to you I couldn't give myself to Jerrold. If I belong to
Jerrold, how can I give myself to you?"

"I see. It's like that, is it?"

"It's like that."

Eliot said no more. He knew when he was beaten.

v

Maisie sat alone in her own room, thinking it over. She didn't know yet
that Eliot had come. He had arrived while she was with Anne and she had
missed him on the way to Barrow Farm, driving up by the hill road while
he walked down through the fields.

She didn't think of Jerrold all at once. Her mind was taken up with Anne
and Anne's unhappiness. She could see nothing else. She remembered how
Adeline had told her that Anne was in love with Jerrold. She had said,
"It was funny when she was a little thing." Anne had loved him all her
life, then. All her life she had had to do without him.

Maisie thought: Perhaps he would have loved her and married her if it
hadn't been for me. And yet Anne had loved her.

That was Anne's beauty.

She wondered next: If Anne had been in love with Jerrold all that time,
and if they had all seen it, all the Fieldings and John Severn, how was
it that she had never seen it? She had seen nothing but a perfect
friendship, and she had tried to keep it for them in all its perfection,
so that neither of them should miss anything because Jerrold had married
her. She remembered how happy Anne had been when she first knew her, and
she thought: If she was happy then, why is she unhappy now? If she loved
Jerrold all her life, if she had done without him all her life, why go
away now?

Unless something had happened.

It was then that Maisie thought of Jerrold, and his sad, drawn face and
his sudden sickness the other day. That was the day he had