Sam was still staring at her. “You!” he said. “What can you do?” “I can see you and Effie happy, and I dunno as owt else matters.” It did not matter what the cost was to Anne. “When you used to come home to your tea from Mr. Travers’ office, what you left was always good enough for me, and I can stomach your leavings still.” It startled Effie, who had thought herself a specialist in sacrifice. This was the very ferocity of self-denial. So far, tired and overstrained, Effie had found peace in resigning the leadership to Anne, but here was a lead she could not follow. It was not that she mistook Anne’s purpose or doubted her capacity. Her faith in Anne was young but adamantine, and she knew that if Anne replaced Sam with Ada, and made herself heir to the Marbeck plan, she would unquestionably do for Ada what Sam had undertaken to do. But the thing was simply not good enough. “No, Mrs. Branstone, no,” she said firmly. “Get oft’ with you,” said Anne impolitely. “I can tackle Ada with one hand tied behind my back.” “Of course,” Sam agreed, “you could, but you are not going to. Ada’s my job.” “I can be pig-headed as well as you, my lad,” Anne menaced him. “It’s not that, mother.” “No, it isn’t that,” said Effie, conceiving perhaps that it was time for her to enter into this tragicomedy of rivalry in self-surrender. “Sam’s right. Ada does matter, and it is I who am the failure, I who have broken faith, I who was arrogant. I thought that I could bear a torch, and I can only bear a child. But I know now what I have to do. I can go away. I can disappear.” It seemed to Anne that this was serious because obviously it was a way out; but she thought it a way much more appalling in prospect than the plan she had proposed for herself of “taking Ada on.” She took alarm. In another than Effie it might have been heroics, but Effie’s was not the stuff that mouths bravado. Anne granted that, and saw a tragic chasm yawn She signalled her alarm to Sam, who answered it with a glance which made appeal to her, whilst yielding nothing of his obstinacy. “If you go away,” he said, “my mother goes with you. I’ve meant that from the first.” Anne nodded without enthusiasm. Certainly that was a solution and equally not the solution. It gave Sam to Ada, and Effie, it appeared, was not seeing it as a solution at all. There were strange possibilities, Anne thought, in this young woman, and she did not want them to be tested too far. Effie was not a talker, and when she said a thing she did not overstate. There was danger. Well, Anne was forewarned, and addressed herself in her most humorous, common-sense manner to laugh it out of court. One can deal with danger in worse ways than to apply to it the acid--ridicule.