ow, Eliot, but I don't think so."

He went away with a faint hope. She had said it would be different; what
she would never do for him she might do for Jerrold.

She might, after all, marry him to keep Jerrold safe.

Nothing made any difference. Whatever Anne did she would still be Anne.
And it was Anne he loved. And, after all, what did he know about her and
Jerrold? Only that if they had been lovers that would account for their
strange happiness seven months ago; if they had given each other up this
would account for their unhappiness now. He thought: How they must have
struggled.

Perhaps, some day, when the whole story was told and Anne was tired of
struggling, she would come to him and he would marry her.

Even if----

XVIII

JERROLD AND ANNE

i

The Barrow Farm house, long, low and grey, stood back behind the tall
elms and turned its blank north gable end to the road and the Manor
Farm. Its nine mullioned windows looked down the field to the river. And
the great barns were piled behind it, long roof-trees, steep,
mouse-coloured slopes and peaks above grey walls.

Anne didn't move into the Barrow Farm house all at once. She had to wait
while Jerrold had the place made beautiful for her.

This was the only thing that roused him to any interest. Through all his
misery he could still find pleasure in the work of throwing small rooms
into one to make more space for Anne, and putting windows into the south
gable to give her the sun.

Anne's garden absorbed him more than his own seven hundred acres. Maisie
and he planned it together, walking round the rank flower-beds, and bald
wastes scratched up by the hens.

There was to be a flagged court on one side and a grass plot on the
other, with a flower garden between. Here, Maisie said, there should be
great clumps of larkspurs and there a lavender hedge. They said how nice
it would be for Anne to watch the garden grow.

"He's going to make it so beautiful that you'll want to stay in it
forever," she said.

And Anne went with them and listened to them, and told them they were
angels, and pretended to be excited about her house and garden, while
all the time her heart ached and she was too tired to care.

The house was finished by the end of November and Jerrold and Maisie
helped her to furnish it. Maisie sent to London for patterns and brought
them to Anne to choose. Maisie thought perhaps the chintz with the cream
and pink roses, or the one with t