gh it unevenly, in light
jerks.

"She's asleep, Jerrold."

They sat still, making no sound.

And as she looked at Maisie sleeping, tears came again into Anne's eyes,
the hard tears that cut her eyelids and spilled themselves, drop by slow
drop, heavily. She tried to wipe them away secretly with her hand before
Jerrold saw them; but they came again and again and he had seen. He had
risen to his feet as if he would go, then checked himself and stood
beside her; and together they looked on at Maisie's sleeping; they felt
together the infinite anguish, the infinite pathos of her goodness and
her trust. The beauty of her spirit lay bare to them in the white,
tilted face, slackened and smoothed with sleep. Sleep showed them her
innocence again, naked and helpless. They saw her in her poignant being,
her intense reality. She was so real that in that moment nothing else
mattered to them.

Anne set her teeth hard to keep her mouth still. She saw Jerrold glance
at her, she heard him give a soft groan of pity or of pain; then he
moved away from them and stood by the terrace wall with his back to her.
She saw his clenched hands, and through his terrible, tense quietness
she knew by the quivering of his shoulders that his breast heaved. Then
she saw him grasp the terrace wall and grind the edge of it into the
palms of his hands. That was how he had stood by his father's deathbed,
gripping the foot-rail; and when presently he turned and came to her she
saw the look on his face she had seen then, of young, blind agony,
sharpened now with some more piercing spiritual pain.

"Come," he said, "come into the house."

They went together, side by side, as they had gone when they were
children, along the terrace and down the steps into the drive. In the
shelter of the hall she gave way and cried, openly and helplessly, like
a child, and he put his arm round her and led her into the library, away
from the place where Maisie was. They sat together on the couch, holding
each other's hands, clinging together in their suffering, their memory
of what Maisie had made their sin. Even so they had sat in Anne's room,
on the edge of Anne's bed, when they were children, holding each other's
hands, miserable and yet glad because they were brought together,
because what they had done and what they had borne they had done and
borne together. And now as then he comforted her.

"Don't cry, Anne darling; it isn't your fault. I made you."

"You didn'