ing
to Maisie, the blood mounted to her face, flooding it to the roots of
her hair.

"I'm thinking of Colin."

Her voice kept on sounding loud and dreadful in her brain, while
Maisie's voice floated across it, faint, as if it came from somewhere a
long way off.

"You never think of yourself. You're too good for anything, Anne."

She would never be safe from Maisie and Maisie's innocence that accused,
reproached and threatened her. Maisie's sweetness went through her like
a thrusting sword, like a sharp poison; it had words that cut deeper
than threats, reproaches, accusations. Before she had seen Maisie she
had been fearless, pitiless, remorseless; now, because of Maisie, she
would never be safe from remorse and pity and fear.

She recovered. She told herself that she hadn't lied; that she _had_
been thinking of Colin; that she had thought of him first; that she had
refused to go to Taormina before she knew that Jerrold was coming back
for the hay harvest. She couldn't help it if she knew that now. It was
not as if she had schemed for it or counted on it. She had never for one
moment counted on anything or schemed. And still, as she thought of
Jerrold, her heart tightened on the sharp sword-thrust of remorse.

Because of Maisie, nothing would ever be the same again.

ii

In the last week of April they had gone, Jerrold and Maisie, Eliot and
Colin, to Taormina. In the last week in May Jerrold and Eliot took
Maisie up to Como on their way home. They found Sir Charles and Lady
Durham there waiting for her. They had left Colin by himself at
Taormina.

From the first moment of landing Colin had fallen in love with Sicily
and refused to be taken away from it. He was aware that his recovery was
now in his own hands, and that he would not be free from his malady so
long as he was afraid to be alone. He had got to break himself of his
habit of dependence on other people. And here in Taormina he had come
upon the place that he could bear to be alone in. There was freedom in
his surrender to its enchantment and in the contemplation of its beauty
there was peace. And with peace and freedom he had found his
indestructible self; he had come to the end of its long injury.

One day, sitting out on the balcony of his hotel, he wrote to Anne.

"Don't imagine because I've got well here away from you that it wasn't
you who made me well. In the first place, I should never have gone away
if you hadn't made me go. You knew wha