“I don’t think I can tell you.”

“But I must know, Jerrold.  It makes all the difference.”

“It makes none to me, Anne.  I’d want you whether Maisie cared for me or not.  But she doesn’t.”

“If I thought she didn’t—­then—­then I shouldn’t mind her knowing.  Why are you so certain?  You might tell me.”

Then he told her.

After all, that sense of hidden certainty was an illusion.

“When was that, Jerrold?”

“Oh, a night or two after she came down here in April.  She didn’t know, poor darling, how she let me off.”

“April—­September.  And she’s stuck to it?”

“Oh—­stuck to it.  Rather.”

“And before that?”

“Before that we were all right.”

“And she’d been away, too.”

“Yes.  Ages.  That made it all the funnier.”

“I wish you’d told me before.”

“I wish I had, if it makes you happier.”

“It does.  Still, we can’t go on, Jerrold, till she knows.”

“Of course we can’t.  It’s too awful.  I’ll tell her.  And we’ll go away somewhere while she’s divorcing me, and stay away till I can marry you....  It’ll be all different when we’ve got away.”

“When you’ve told her.  We ought to have told her long ago, before it happened.”

“Yes.  But now—­what the devil am I to tell her?”

He saw, as if for the first time, what telling her would mean.

“Tell her the truth.  The whole truth.”

“How can I—­when it’s you?”

“It’s because it is me that you’ve got to tell her.  If you don’t, Jerrold, I’ll tell her myself.”

“All right.  I’ll tell her at once and get it over.  I’ll tell her tonight.”

“No.  Not tonight, while she’s so tired.  Wait till she’s rested.”

And Jerrold waited.

XVI

ANNE, MAISIE, AND JERROLD

i

Jerrold waited, and Maisie got her truth in first.

It was on the Wednesday, a fine bright day in September, and Jerrold was to have driven Maisie and Anne over to Oxford in the car.  And, ten minutes before starting, Maisie had declared herself too tired to go.  Anne wouldn’t go without her, and Jerrold, rather sulky, had set off by himself.  He couldn’t understand Maisie’s sudden fits of fatigue when there was nothing the matter with her.  He thought her capricious and hysterical.  She was acquiring his mother’s perverse habit of upsetting your engagements at the last moment; and lately she had been particularly tiresome about motoring.  Either they were going too fast or too far, or the wind was too strong; and he would have to turn back, or hold himself in and go slowly.  And the next time she would refuse to go at all for fear of spoiling their pleasure.  She liked it better when Anne drove her.