nt ones, laughing out into the darkness. She saw again Jerrold's
hard, unhappy face trying to smile; his mouth jerking in the tight,
difficult smile that was like an agony. And it used to be Jerrold who
was always happy, who went laughing.

She turned up and down the beautiful lighted room; she looked again and
again at the things they had given her, Colin and Jerrold and Maisie.

Maisie. She would have to live with the cruelty of Maisie's gifts, with
Maisie's wounding kindness and her innocence. Maisie's curtains,
Maisie's couch, covered with flowers that smiled at her, gay on the
white ground. She thought of the other house, of the curtains that had
shut out the light from her and Jerrold, of the couch where she had lain
in his arms. Each object had a dumb but poignant life that reminded and
reproached her.

This was the scene where her life was to be cast. Henceforth these
things would know her in her desolation. Jerrold would never come to her
here as he had come to the Manor Farm house; they would never sit
together talking by this fireside; those curtains would never be drawn
on their passion; he would never go up to that lamp and put it out; she
would never lie here waiting, thrilling, as he came to her through the
darkness.

She had wanted the Barrow Farm and she had got what she had wanted, and
she had got it too late. She loved it. Yet how was it possible to love
the place that she was to be so unhappy in? She ought to hate it with
its enclosing walls, its bright-eyed, watching furniture, its air of
quiet complicity in her pain.

She drew back the curtains. The lamp and its yellow flame hung out there
on the darkness of the fields. The fields dropped away through the
darkness to the river, and there were the black masses of the trees.

There the earth waited for her. Out there was the only life left for her
to live. The life of struggling with the earth, forcing the earth to
yield to her more than it had yielded to the men who had tilled it
before her, making the bad land good. Ploughing time would come and seed
time, and hay harvest and corn harvest. Feeding time and milking time
would come. She would go on seeing the same things done at the same
hour, at the same season, day after day and year after year. There would
have been joy in that if it had been Jerrold's land, if she could have
gone on working for Jerrold and with Jerrold. And if she had not been so
tired.

She was only twenty-nine and Jerro