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 the green leaves and red tulips and blue and purple clematis was the prettiest.  Anne tried to behave as if all her happiness depended on a pattern, and ended by choosing the one that Maisie liked best.  And the furniture went where Maisie thought it should go, because Anne was too tired to care.  Besides, she was busy on her farm.  Old Sutton in his decadence had let most of his arable land run to waste, and Anne’s job was to make good soil again out of bad.

Maisie was pleased like a child and excited with her planning.  Her idea was that Anne should come in from her work on the land and find the house all ready for her, everything in its place, chairs and sofas dressed in their gay suits of chintz, the books on their shelves, the blue-and-white china in rows on the oak dresser.

Tea was set out on the gate-legged table before the wide hearth-place.  The lamps were lit.  A big fire burned.  Colin and Jerrold and Maisie were there waiting for her.  And Anne came in out of the fields, tired and white and thin, her black hair drooping.  Her rough land dress hung slack on her slender body.