“I care for you a great deal; but not in that sort of way.”

“I’m not asking you to care for me in the way you care for Jerrold.  You may care for me any way you please if you’ll only marry me.  You don’t know how awfully little I’d be content to take.”

“I shouldn’t be content to give it, though.  You oughtn’t to have anything but the best.”

“It would be the best for me, you see.”

“Oh no, Eliot, it wouldn’t.  You only think it would because you’re an angel.  It would be awful of me to give so little when I take such a lot.  I know what your loving would be.”

“If you know you must have thought of it.  And if you’ve thought of it—­”

“I’ve only thought of it to see how impossible it is.  It mightn’t be if I could leave off loving Jerrold.  But I can’t...Eliot, I’ve got the queerest feeling about him.  I know you’ll think me mad, when he’s gone and married somebody else, but I feel all the time as if he hadn’t, as if he belonged to me and always had; and I to him.  Whoever Maisie’s married it isn’t Jerrold.  Not the real Jerrold.”

“The fact remains that she’s married him.”

“No.  Not him.  Only a bit of him.  Some bit that doesn’t matter.”

“Anne darling, I’d try not to think that.”

“I don’t think it.  I feel it.  Down there, deep inside me.  I’ve always felt that Jerrold would come back to me and he came back.  Then there was Colin.  He’ll come back again.”

“Then there’ll be Maisie.”

“No, then there won’t be Maisie.  There won’t be anything if he really comes...Now you see how mad I am.  Now you see how awful it would be to marry me.”

“No, Anne.  I see it’s the only way to keep you safe.”

“Safe from what?  Safe from Jerrold?  I don’t want to be safe from him.  Eliot, I’m telling you this because you trust me.  I want you to see me as I really am, so that you won’t want to marry me any more.”

“Ah, that’s not the way to make me.  Nothing you say makes any difference.  Nothing you could do would make any difference.”

“Supposing it had been true what your mother said, wouldn’t that?”

“No.  If you’d given yourself to Colin I should only have thought it was your goodness.  It would have been good because you did it.”

“How queer.  That’s what Jerrold said.  Then he did love me.”

“I told you he loved you.”

“Then I don’t care.  Nothing else matters.”

“That’s all you have to say to me?”

“Yes.  Unless I lie.”

“You’d lie for Jerrold.”

“For him.  Not to him.  I should never need to.”

“You’ve no need to lie to me, dear.  I know you better than he does.  You forget that I didn’t think what he thought.”

“That only shows that he knew.”

“Knew what?”

“What I am.  What I might do if I really cared.”

“There are things you’d never do.  You’d never do anything mean or dishonourable or cruel.”