said,
whose motives would always be clean."

If he had tried he couldn't have hit on anything that would have hurt
her so. It was more than she could bear to be punished like this through
the innocence of innocent people, through their kindness and affection,
their belief, their incorruptible trust in her. There was nothing in the
world she dreaded more than Maisie's trust. It was as if she foresaw
what it would do to her, how at any minute it would beat her, it would
break her down.

But she was not beaten yet, not broken down. After every fit of remorse
her passion asserted itself again in a superb recovery. Her motives
might not be so spotless as they looked to Maisie, but her passion
itself was clean as fire. Nothing, not even Maisie's innocence, Maisie's
trust in her, could make her go back on it. Hard, wounding tears cut
through her eyelids as she thought of Maisie, but she brushed them away
and began counting the days till Jerrold should come back.

iii

He came back the first week in June, in time for the hay harvest. And it
happened as she had foreseen.

It would have been dangerous for Jerrold to have left the house at night
to go to the Manor Farm. At any moment he might have been betrayed by
his own footsteps treading the passages and stairs, by the slipping of
locks and bolts, the sound of the opening and shutting of doors. The
servants might be awake and hear him; they might go to his room and find
that he was not there.

But Colin's shelter stood in a recess on the lawn, open to the fields
and hidden from the house by tall hedges of yew. Nobody could see him
slip out into the moonlight or the darkness; nobody could hear the soft
padding of his feet on the grass. He had only to run down the three
fields and cross the belt of firs to come to Anne's shelter at the
bottom. The blank, projecting wall of the mill hid it from the cottages
and the Manor Farm house; the firs hid it from the field path; a high
bank, topped by a stone wall, hid it from the road and Sutton's Farm.
Its three wooden walls held them safe.

Night after night, between eleven and midnight, he came to her. Night
after night, she lay awake waiting till the light rustling of the meadow
grass told her he was there: on moonlit nights a quick brushing sound;
in the thick blackness a sound like a slow shearing as he felt his way.
The moon would show him clear, as he stood in the open frame of the
shelter, looking in at her; or she woul