"I do want to marry you. I shall always want to marry you. I told you long ago nothing would ever make any difference. "Even if----?" "Even if--Whatever you did or didn't do I'd still want you. But I told you--don't you remember?--that you could never do anything dishonourable or cruel." "And I told you I wasn't sure." "And I am sure. That's enough for me. I don't want to know anything more. I don't want to know anything you'd rather I didn't know." "Oh, Eliot, you _are_ so good. You're good like Maisie. Don't worry about Jerry and me. We'll see it through somehow." "And if you can't stand the strain of it?" "But I can." "And if _he_ can't? If you want to be safe----" "I told you I should never want to be safe." "If you want _him_ to be safe, then, would you marry me?" "That's different. I don't know, 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.