Se

For many months Ansdore was a piece of wreckage to which a drowning woman clung. Joanna’s ship had foundered the high-castled, seaworthy ship of her life and she drifted through the dark seas, clinging only to this which had once been so splendid in the midst of her decks, but was now mere wreckage, the least thing saved. If she let go she would drown. So she trailed after Ansdore, and at last it brought her a kind of anchorage, not in her native land, but at least in no unkind country of adoption. During the last weeks of Martin’s wooing, she had withdrawn herself a little from the business of the farm into a kind of overlordship, from which she was far more free to detach herself than from personal service. Now she went back to work with her hands she did not want free hours, either for his company or for her own dreams; she rose early, because she waked early and must rise when she waked, and she went round waking the girls, hustling the men, putting her own hand to the milking or the cooking, more sharp-tongued than ever, less tolerant, but more terribly alive, with a kind of burning, consuming life that vexed all those about her.

“She spicks short wud me,” said old Stuppeny, “and I’ve toeald her as she mun look around fur a new head man. This time I’m going.”

“She’s a scold,” said Broadhurst, “and reckon the young chap saeaved himself a tedious life by dying.”

“Reckon her heart’s broke,” said Mrs. Tolhurst.

“Her temper’s broke,” said Milly Pump.

They were unsympathetic, because she expressed her grief in terms of fierce activity instead of in the lackadaisical ways of tradition. If Joanna had taken to her bed on her return from North Farthing House that early time, and had sent for the doctor, and shown all the credited symptoms of a broken heart, they would have pitied her and served her and borne with her. But, instead, she had come back hustling and scolding, and they could not see that she did so because not merely her heart but her whole self was broken, and that she was just flying and rattling about like a broken thing. So instead of pitying her, they grumbled and threatened to leave her service in fact, Milly Pump actually did so, and was succeeded by Mene Tekel Fagge, the daughter of Bibliolatious parents at Northlade.

Ansdore throve on its mistress’s frenzy. That autumn Joanna had four hundred pounds in Lewes Old Bank, the result of her splendid markets and of her new ploughs, which had borne eight bushels to the acre. She had triumphed gloriously over everyone who had foretold her ruin through breaking up pasture; strong-minded farmers could scarcely bear to drive along that lap of the Brodnyx road which ran through Joanna’s wheat, springing slim and strong and heavy-eared as from Lothian soil if there had been another way from Brodnyx to Rye market they would have taken it; indeed it was rumoured that on one occasion Vine had gone by train from Appledore because he couldn’t abear the sight of Joanna Godden’s ploughs.

This rumour, when it reached her, brought her a faint thrill. It was the beginning of a slow process of reidentification of herself with her own activities, which till then had been as some furious raging outside the house. She began to picture new acts of discomfiting adventure, new roads which should be shut to Vine through envy. Ansdore was all she had, so she must make it much. When she had given it and herself to Martin she had had all the Marsh and all the world to plant with her love; but since he was gone and had left her gifts behind him, she had just a few acres to plant with wheat and her harvest should be bread alone.

Se

Her black months had changed her not outwardly very much, but leaving wounds in her heart. Martin had woken in her too many needs for her to be able to go back quietly into the old life of unfulfilled content. He had shown her a vision of herself as complete woman, mother and wife, of a Joanna Godden bigger than Ansdore. She could no longer be the Joanna Godden whose highest ambition was to be admitted member of the Farmers’ Club. He had also woken in her certain simple cravings for a man’s strong arm round her and his shoulder under her cheek. She had now to make the humiliating discovery that the husk of such a need can remain after the creating spirit had left it. In the course of the next year she had one or two small, rather undignified flirtations with neighbouring farmers there was young Gain over at Botolph’s Bridge, and Ernest Noakes of Belgar. They did not last long, and she finally abandoned both in disgust, but a side of her, always active unconsciously, was now disturbingly awake, requiring more concrete satisfactions than the veiled, self-deceiving episode of Socknersh.

She was ashamed of this. And it made her withdraw from comforts she might have had. She never went to North Farthing House, where she could have talked about Martin with the one person who as it happened would have understood her treacheries. Lawrence came to see her once at the end of September, but she was gruff and silent. She recoiled from his efforts to break the barriers between life and death; he wanted her to give Martin her thoughts and her prayers just as if he were alive. But she “didn’t hold with praying for the dead” the Lion and the Unicorn would certainly disapprove of such an act; and Martin was now robed in white, with a crown on his head and a harp in his hand and a new song in his mouth he had no need of the prayers of Joanna Godden’s unfaithful lips. As for her thoughts, by the same token she could not think of him as he was now; that radiant being in glistening white was beyond the soft approaches of imagination robed and crowned, he could scarcely be expected to remember himself in a tweed suit and muddy boots kissing a flushed and hot Joanna on the lonely innings by Beggar’s Bush. No, Martin was gone gone beyond thought and prayer gone to sing hymns for ever and ever he who could never abide them on earth gone to forget Joanna in the company of angels pictured uncomfortably by her as females, who would be sure to tell him that she had let Thomas Gain kiss her in the barn over at Botolph’s Bridge....

She could not think of him as he was now, remote and white, and she could bear still less to think of him as he had been once, warm and loving, with his caressing hands and untidy hair, with his flushed cheek pressed against hers, and the good smell of his clothes with his living mouth closing slowly down on hers ... no, earth was even sharper than heaven. All she had of him in which her memory and her love could find rest were those few common things they keep to remember their dead by on the Marsh a memorial card, thickly edged with black, which she had had printed at her own expense, since apparently such things were no part of the mourning of North Farthing House; his photograph in a black frame; his grave in Brodnyx churchyard, in the shadow of the black, three-hooded tower, and not very far from the altar-tomb on which he had sat and waited for her that Christmas morning.

Se

In the fall of the next year, she found that once again she had something to engross her outside Ansdore. Ellen was to leave school that Christmas. The little sister was now seventeen, and endowed with all the grace; and learning that forty pounds a term can buy. During the last year she and Joanna had seen comparatively little of each other. She had received one or two invitations from her school friends to spend her holidays with them a fine testimonial, thought Joanna, to her manners and accomplishments and her sister had been only too glad that she should go, that she should be put out of the shadow of a grief which had grown too black even for her sentimental schoolgirl sympathy, so gushing and caressing, in the first weeks of her poor Joanna’s mourning.

But things were different now Martin’s memory was laid. She told herself that it was because she was too busy that she had not gone as usual to the Harvest Festival at New Romney, to sing hymns beside the pillar marked with the old floods. She was beginning to forget. She could think and she could love. She longed to have Ellen back again, to love and spoil and chasten. She was glad that she was leaving school, and would make no fugitive visit to Ansdore. Immediately her mind leapt to preparations her sister was too big to sleep any more in the little bed at the foot of her own, she must have a new bed ... and suddenly Joanna thought of a new room, a project which would mop up all her overflowing energies for the next month.

It should be a surprise for Ellen. She sent for painters and paper-hangers, and chose a wonderful new wall-paper of climbing chrysanthemums, rose and blue in colour, and tied with large bows of gold ribbon real, shining gold. The paint she chose was a delicate fawn, picked out with rose and blue. She bought yards of flowered cretonne for the bed and window curtains, and had the mahogany furniture moved in from the spare bedroom. The carpet she bought brand new it was a sea of stormy crimson, with fawn-coloured islands rioted over with roses and blue tulips. Joanna had never enjoyed herself so much since she lost Martin, as she did now, choosing all the rich colours, and splendid solid furniture. The room cost her nearly forty pounds, for she had to buy new furniture for the spare bedroom, having given Ellen the mahogany.

As a final touch she hung the walls with pictures. There was a large photograph of Ventnor church, Isle of Wight, and another of Furness Abbey in an Oxford frame; there was “Don’t Touch” and “Mother’s Boy” from “Pears’ Christmas Annual,” and two texts, properly expounded with robins. To crown all, there was her father’s certificate of enrolment in the Ancient Order of Buffaloes, sacrificed from her own room, and hung proudly in the place of honour over Ellen’s bed.

Se

Her sister came at Thomas-tide, and Joanna drove in to meet her at Rye. Brodnyx had now a station of its own on the new light railway from Appledore to Lydd, but Joanna was still faithful to Rye. She loved the spanking miles, the hard white lick of road that flew under her wheels as she drove through Pedlinge, and then, swinging round the throws, flung out on the Straight Mile. She trotted under the Land Gate, feeling pleasantly that all the town was watching her from shop and street. Her old love of swagger had come back, with perhaps a slight touch of defiance.

At the station she had to wake old Stuppeny out of his slumber on the back seat, and put him in his proper place at Smiler’s head, while she went on the platform. The train was just due, and she had not passed many remarks with the ticket-collector a comely young fellow whom she liked for his build and the sauciness of his tongue before it arrived. As it steamed in, her heart began to beat anxiously she bit her lip, and actually looked nervous. Ellen was the only person in the world who could make her feel shy and ill at ease, and Ellen had only lately acquired this power; but there had been a constraint about their meetings for the last year. During the last year Ellen had become terribly good-mannered and grown up, and somehow that first glimpse of the elegant maiden whom her toil and sacrifice had built out of little Ellen Godden of Ansdore, never failed to give Joanna a queer sense of awkwardness and inferiority.

To-day Ellen was more impressive, more “different” than ever. She had been allowed to buy new clothes before leaving Folkestone, and her long blue coat and neat little hat made Joanna, for the first time in her life, feel tawdry and savage in her fur and feathers. Her sister stepped down from her third-class carriage as a queen from her throne, beckoned to Rye’s one porter, and without a word pointed back into the compartment, from which he removed a handbag; whereat she graciously gave him twopence and proceeded to greet Joanna.

“Dear Jo,” she murmured, filling her embrace with a soft perfume of hair, which somehow stifled the “Hello, duckie” on the other’s tongue.

Joanna found herself turning to Rye’s one porter with inquiries after his wife and little boy, doing her best to take the chill off the proceedings. She wished that Ellen wouldn’t give herself these airs. It is true that they always wore off as Ansdore reasserted itself in old clothes and squabbles, but Joanna resented her first impressions.

However, her sister thawed a little on the drive home she was curious about the affairs of Brodnyx and Pedlinge, for her time in two worlds was at an end, and Ansdore was henceforth to give her its horizons.

“Will there be any parties at Christmas?” she asked.

“Sure to be,” said Joanna, “I’ll be giving one myself, and Mrs. Vine was telling me only yesterday as she’s a mind to have some neighbours in for whist.”

“Won’t there be any dancing?”

“Oh, it’s that what you’re after, is it?” said Joanna proudly.

“Mabel and Pauline are going to heaps of dances this Christmas and Myra West is coming out. Mayn’t I come out, Joanna?”

“Come out o’ what, dearie?”

“Oh, you know put up my hair and go to balls.”

“You can put your hair up any day you please I put mine up at fifteen, and you’re turned seventeen now. As for balls ...”

She broke off, a little at a loss as to how she was to supply this deficiency. It would scarcely be possible for her to break into the enclosures of Dungemarsh Court especially since she had allowed herself to drop away from North Farthing House ... she had been a fool to do that Sir Harry might have helped her now. But then ... her lips tightened.... Anyhow, he would not be at home for Christmas since Martin’s death he had sub-let the farm and was a good deal away; people said he had “come into” some money, left him by a former mistress, who had died more grateful than he deserved.

“I’ll do the best I can for you, duck,” said Joanna, “you shall have your bit of dancing and anyways I’ve got a fine, big surprise for you when we’re home.”

“What sort of a surprise?”

“That’s telling.”

Ellen, in spite of her dignity, was child enough to be intensely excited at the idea of a secret, and the rest of the drive was spent in baffled question and provoking answer.

“I believe it’s something for me to wear,” she said finally, as they climbed out of the trap at the front door “a ring, Joanna.... I’ve always wanted a ring.”

“It’s better than a ring,” said Joanna, “leastways it’s bigger,” and she laughed to herself.

She led the way upstairs, while Mrs. Tolhurst and old Stuppeny waltzed recriminatingly with Ellen’s box.

“Where are you taking me?” asked her sister, pausing with her hand on the door-knob of Joanna’s bedroom.

“Never you mind come on.”

Would Mene Tekel, she wondered, have remembered to set the lamps, so that the room should not depend on the faint gutter of sunset to display its glories? She opened the door, and was reassured a fury of light and colour leapt out rose, blue, green, buff, and the port-wine red of mahogany. The pink curtains were drawn, but there was no fire in the grate for fires in bedrooms were unknown at Ansdore; however, a Christmas-like effect was given by sprigs of holly stuck in the picture-frames, and a string of paper flowers hung from the bed-tester to the top of the big woolly bell-rope by the mantelpiece. Joanna heard her sister gasp.

“It’s yours, Ellen your new room. I’ve given it to you all to yourself. There’s the spare mahogany furniture, and the best pictures, and poor father’s Buffalo certificate.”

The triumph of her own achievement melted away the last of her uneasiness she seized Ellen in her arms and kissed her, knocking her hat over one ear.

“See, you’ve got new curtains eighteenpence a yard ... and that’s mother’s text ’Inasmuch....’ and I’ve bought a new soap-dish at Godfrey’s it doesn’t quite go with the basin, but they’ve both got roses on ’em ... and you won’t mind there being a few of my gowns in the wardrobe only the skirts I’ve got room for the bodies in my drawers ... that’s the basket armchair out of the dining-room, with a new cover that Mene Tekel fixed for it ... the clock’s out of the spare room it don’t go, but it looks fine on the mantelpiece.... Say, duckie, are you pleased? are you pleased with your old Jo?”

“Oh, Joanna ... thank you,” said Ellen.

“Well, I’ll have to be leaving you now that gal’s got a rabbit pie in the oven for our tea, and I must go and have a look at her crust. You unpack and clean yourself and be careful not to spoil anything.”

Se

Supper that night was rather a quiet meal. Something about Ellen drove Joanna back into her old sense of estrangement. Her sister made her think of a lily on a thundery day. She wore a clinging dress of dull green stuff, which sheathed her delicate figure like a lily bract her throat rose out of it like a lily stalk, and her face, with its small features and soft skin, was the face of a white flower. About her clung a dim atmosphere of the languid and exotic, like the lily’s scent which is so unlike the lily.

“Ellen,” broke out Joanna, with a glance down at her own high, tight bosom, “don’t you ever wear stays?”

“No. Miss Collins and the gym mistress both say it’s unhealthy.”

“Unhealthy! And don’t they never wear none themselves?”

“Never. They look much better without besides, small waists are going out of fashion.”

“But ... Ellen ... it ain’t seemly to show the natural shape of your body as you’re doing.”

“I’ve been told my figure’s a very good one.”

“And whoever dared make such a remark to you?”

“It was a compliment.”

“I don’t call it any compliment to say such things to a young girl. Besides, what right have you to go showing what you was meant to hide?”

“I’m not showing anything I was meant to hide. My figure isn’t nearly so pronounced as yours if I had your figure, I couldn’t wear this sort of frock.”

“My figure is as God made it” which it certainly was not “and I was brought up to be the shape of a woman, in proper stays, and not the shape of a heathen statue. I’d be ashamed for any of the folk around here to see you like that and if Arthur Alce, or any other man, came in, I’d either have to send you out or wrap the table-cover round you.”

Ellen took refuge in a haughty silence, and Joanna began to feel uneasy and depressed. She thought that Ellen was “fast.” Was this what she had learned at school to flout the standards of her home?

Se

The next morning Joanna overslept herself, in consequence of a restless hour during the first part of the night. As a result, it had struck half past seven before she went into her sister’s room. She was not the kind of person who knocks at doors, and burst in to find Ellen, inadequately clothed in funny little garments, doing something very busily inside the cupboard.

“Hullo, duckie! And how did you sleep in your lovely bed?”

She was once more aglow with the vitality and triumph of her own being, but the next moment she experienced a vague sense of chill something was the matter with the room, something had happened to it. It had lost its sense of cheerful riot, and wore a chastened, hangdog air. In a spasm of consternation Joanna realized that Ellen had been tampering with it.

“What have you done? Where’s my pictures? Where’ve you put the window curtains?” she cried at last.

Ellen stiffened herself and tried not to look guilty.

“I’m just trying to find room for my own things.”

Joanna stared about her.

“Where’s father’s Buffalo certificate?”

“I’ve put it in the cupboard.”

“In the cupboard! father’s ... and I’m blessed if you haven’t taken down the curtains.”

“They clash with the carpet it quite hurts me to look at them. Really, Joanna, if this is my room, you oughtn’t to mind what I do in it.”

“Your room, indeed! You’ve got some sass! And I spending more’n forty pound fixing it up for you. I’ve given you new wall paper and new carpet and new curtains and all the best pictures, and took an unaccountable lot of trouble, and now you go and mess it up.”

“I haven’t messed it up. On the contrary” Ellen’s vexation was breaking through her sense of guilt “I’m doing the best I can to make it look decent. Since you say you’ve done it specially for me and spent all that money on it, I think at least you might have consulted my taste a little.”

“And what is your taste, ma’am?”

“A bit quieter than yours,” said Ellen saucily. “There are about six different shades of red and pink in this room.”

“And what shades would you have chosen, may I be so bold as to ask?” Joanna’s voice dragged ominously with patience “the same shade as your last night’s gownd, which is the colour of the mould on jam? I’ll have the colours I like in my own house I’m sick of your dentical, die-away notions. You come home from school thinking you know everything, when all you’ve learned is to despise my best pictures, and say my curtains clash with the carpet, when I chose ’em for a nice match. I tell you what, ma’am, you can just about put them curtains back, and them pictures, and that certificate of poor father’s that you’re so ashamed of.”

“I want to put my own pictures up,” said Ellen doggedly “if I’ve got to live with your carpet and wallpaper, I don’t see why I shouldn’t have my own pictures.”

Joanna swept her eye contemptuously over “The Vigil,” “Sir Galahad,” “The Blessed Damozel,” and one or two other schoolgirl favourites that were lying on the bed.

“You can stick those up as well there ain’t such a lot.”

“But can’t you see, Joanna, that there are too many pictures on the wall already? It’s simply crowded with them. Really, you’re an obstinate old beast,” and Ellen began to cry.

Joanna fought back in herself certain symptoms of relenting. She could not bear to see Ellen cry, but on the other hand she had “fixed up” this room for Ellen she had had it furnished and decorated for her and now Ellen must and should appreciate it. She should not be allowed to disguise and bowdlerize it to suit the unwelcome tastes she had acquired at school. The sight of her father’s Buffalo certificate, lying face downwards on the cupboard floor, gave strength to her flagging purpose.

“You pick that up and hang it in its proper place.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.”

“I won’t! Why should I have that hideous thing over my bed?”

“Because it was your father’s, and you should ought to be proud of it.”

“It’s some low drinking society he belonged to, and I’m not proud I’m ashamed.”

Joanna boxed her ears.

“You don’t deserve to be his daughter, Ellen Godden, speaking so. It’s you that’s bringing us all to shame thank goodness you’ve left school, where you learned all that tedious, proud nonsense. You hang those pictures up again, and those curtains, and you’ll keep this room just what I’ve made it for you.”

Ellen was weeping bitterly now, but her sacrilege had hardened Joanna’s heart. She did not leave the room till the deposed dynasty of curtains and pictures was restored, with poor father’s certificate once more in its place of honour. Then she marched out.

Se

The days till Christmas were full of strain. Joanna had won her victory, but she did not find it a satisfying one. Ellen’s position in the Ansdore household was that of a sulky rebel resentful, plaintive, a nurse of hard memories too close to be ignored, too hostile to be trusted.

The tyrant groaned under the heel of her victim. She was used to quarrels, but this was her first experience of a prolonged estrangement. It had been all very well to box Ellen’s ears as a child, and have her shins kicked in return, and then an hour or two later be nursing her on her lap to the tune of “There was an Old Woman,” or “Little Boy Blue".... But this dragged out antagonism wore down her spirits into a long sadness. It was the wrong start for that happy home she had planned, in which Ellen, the little sister, was to absorb that overflowing love which had once been Martin’s, but which his memory could not hold in all its power.

It seemed as if she would be forced to acknowledge Ellen’s education as another of her failures. She had sent her to school to be made a lady of, but the finished article was nearly as disappointing as the cross-bred lambs of Socknersh’s unlucky day. If Ellen had wanted to lie abed of a morning, never to do a hand’s turn of work, or had demanded a table napkin at all her meals, Joanna would have humoured her and bragged about her. But, on the contrary, her sister had learned habits of early rising at school, and if left to herself would have been busy all day with piano or pencil or needle of the finer sort. Also she found more fault with the beauties of Ansdore’s best parlour than the rigours of its kitchen; there lay the sting her revolt was not against the toils and austerities of the farm’s life but against its glories and comelinesses. She despised Ansdore for its very splendours, just as she despised her sister’s best clothes more than her old ones.

By Christmas Day things had righted themselves a little. Ellen was too young to sulk more than a day or two, and she began to forget her grievances in the excitement of the festival. There was the usual communal midday dinner, with Arthur Alce back in his old place at Joanna’s right hand. Alce had behaved like a gentleman, and refused to take back the silver tea set, his premature wedding gift. Then in the evening, Joanna gave a party, at which young Vines and Southlands and Furneses offered their sheepish admiration to her sister Ellen. Of course everyone was agreed that Ellen Godden gave herself lamentable airs, but she appealed to her neighbours’ curiosity through her queer, exotic ways, and the young men found her undeniably beautiful she had a thick, creamy skin, into which her childhood’s roses sometimes came as a dim flush, and the younger generation of the Three Marshes was inclined to revolt from the standards of its fathers.

So young Stacey Vine kissed her daringly under the mistletoe at the passage bend, and was rewarded with a gasp of sweet scent, which made him talk a lot at the Woolpack. While Tom Southland, a man of few words, went home and closed with his father’s offer of a partnership in his farm, which hitherto he had thought of setting aside in favour of an escape to Australia. Ellen was pleased at the time, but a night’s thought made her scornful.

“Don’t you know any really nice people?” she asked Joanna. “Why did you send me to school with gentlemen’s daughters if you just meant me to mix with common people when I came out?”

“You can mix with any gentlefolk you can find to mix with. I myself have been engaged to marry a gentleman’s son, and his father would have come to my party if he hadn’t been away for Christmas.”

She felt angry and sore with Ellen, but she was bound to admit that her grievance had a certain justification. After all, she had always meant her to be a lady, and now, she supposed, she was merely behaving like one. She cast about her for means of introducing her sister into the spheres she coveted ... if only Sir Harry Trevor would come home! But she gathered there was little prospect of that for some time. Then she thought of Mr. Pratt, the rector.... It was the first time that she had ever considered him as a social asset his poverty, his inefficiency and self-depreciation had quite outweighed his gentility in her ideas; he had existed only as the Voice of the Church on Walland Marsh, and the spasmodic respect she paid him was for his office alone. But now she began to remember that he was an educated man and a gentleman, who might supply the want in her sister’s life without in any way encouraging those more undesirable “notions” she had picked up at school.

Accordingly, Mr. Pratt, hitherto neglected, was invited to Ansdore with a frequency and enthusiasm that completely turned his head. He spoiled the whole scheme by misinterpreting its motive, and after about the ninth tea-party, became buoyed with insane and presumptuous hopes, and proposed to Joanna. She was overwhelmed, and did not scruple to overwhelm him, with anger and consternation. It was not that she did not consider the rectory a fit match for Ansdore, even with only two hundred a year attached to it, but she was furious that Mr. Pratt should think it possible that she could fancy him as a man “a little rabbity chap like him, turned fifty, and scarce a hair on him. If he wants another wife at his age he should get an old maid like Miss Godfrey or a hopeful widder like Mrs. Woods not a woman who’s had real men to love her, and ud never look at anything but a real, stout feller.”

However, she confided the proposal to Ellen, for she wanted her sister to know that she had had an offer from a clergyman, and also that she was still considered desirable for once or twice Ellen had thrown out troubling hints that she thought her sister middle-aged. Of course she was turned thirty now, and hard weather and other hard things had made her inclined to look older, by reddening and lining her face. But she had splendid eyes, hair and teeth, and neither the grace nor the energy of youth had left her body, which had coarsened into something rather magnificent, tall and strong, plump without stoutness, clean-limbed without angularity.

She could certainly now have had her pick among the unmarried farmers which could not have been said when she first set up her mastership at Ansdore. Since those times men had learned to tolerate her swaggering ways, also her love affair with Martin had made her more normal, more of a soft, accessible woman. Arthur Alce was no longer the only suitor at Ansdore it was well known that Sam Turner, who had lately moved from inland to Northlade, was wanting to have her, and Hugh Vennal would have been glad to bring her as his second wife to Beggar’s Bush. Joanna was proud of these attachments and saw to it that they were not obscure also, one or two of the men, particularly Vennal, she liked for themselves, for their vitality and “set-upness”; but she shied away from the prospect of marriage. Martin had shown her all that it meant in the way of renunciation, and she felt that she could make its sacrifices for no one less than Martin. Also, the frustration of her hopes and the inadequacy of her memories had produced in her a queer antipathy to marriage a starting aside. Her single state began to have for her a certain worth in itself, a respectable rigour like a pair of stays. For a year or so after Martin’s death, she had maintained her solace of secret kisses, but in time she had come to withdraw even from these, and by now the full force of her vitality was pouring itself into her life at Ansdore, its ambitions and business, her love for Ellen, and her own pride.

Se

Ellen secretly despised Joanna’s suitors, just as she secretly despised all Joanna’s best and most splendid things. They were a dull lot, driving her sister home on market-day, or sitting for hours in the parlour with Arthur Alce’s mother’s silver tea-set. It was always “Good evening, Miss Godden,” “Good evening, Mr. Turner” “Fine weather for roots” “A bit dry for the grazing.” It was not thus that Ellen Godden understood love. Besides, these men looked oafs, in spite of the fine build of some of them they were not so bad in their working clothes, with their leggings and velveteen breeches, but in their Sunday best, which they always wore on these occasions, they looked clumsy and ridiculous, their broad black coats in the cut of yester-year and smelling of camphor, their high-winged collars scraping and reddening their necks ... in their presence Ellen was rather sidling and sweet, but away from them in the riotous privacy of her new bedroom, she laughed to herself and jeered.

She had admirers of her own, but she soon grew tired of them would have grown tired sooner if Joanna had not clucked and shoo’d them away, thus giving them the glamour of the forbidden thing. Joanna looked upon them all as detrimentals, presumptuously lifting up their eyes to Ansdore’s wealth and Ellen’s beauty.

“When you fall in love, you can take a stout yeoman with a bit of money, if you can’t find a real gentleman same as I did. Howsumever, you’re too young to go meddling with such things just yet. You be a good girl, Ellen Godden, and keep your back straight, and don’t let the boys kiss you.”

Ellen had no particular pleasure in letting the boys kiss her she was a cold-blooded little thing but, she asked herself, what else was there to do in a desert like Walland Marsh? The Marsh mocked her every morning as she looked out of her window at the flat miles between Ansdore and Dunge Ness. This was her home this wilderness of straight dykes and crooked roads, every mile of which was a repetition of the mile before it. There was never any change in that landscape, except such as came from the sky cloud-shadows shaking like swift wings across the swamp of buttercups and sunshine, mists lying in strange islands by the sewers, rain turning all things grey, and the wind as it were made visible in a queer flying look put on by the pastures when the storms came groaning inland from Rye Bay ... with a great wail of wind and slash of rain and a howl and shudder through all the house.

She found those months of spring and summer very dreary. She disliked the ways of Ansdore; she met no one but common and vulgar people, who took it for granted that she was just one of themselves. Of course she had lived through more or less the same experiences during her holidays, but then the contact had not been so close or so prolonged, and there had always been the prospect of school to sustain her.

But now schooldays were over, and seemed very far away. Ellen felt cut off from the life and interests of those happy years. She had hoped to receive invitations to go and stay with the friends she had made at school; but months went by and none came. Her school-friends were being absorbed by a life very different from her own, and she was sensitive enough to realize that parents who had not minded her associating with their daughters while they were still at school, would not care for their grown-up lives to be linked together. At first letters were eagerly written and constantly received, but in time even this comfort failed, as ways became still further divided, and Ellen found herself faced with the alternative of complete isolation or such friendships as she could make on the Marsh.

She chose the latter. Though she would have preferred the humblest seat in a drawing-room to the place of honour in a farm-house kitchen, she found a certain pleasure in impressing the rude inhabitants of Brodnyx and Pedlinge with her breeding and taste. She accepted invitations to “drop in after church,” or to take tea, and scratched up rather uncertain friendships with the sisters of the boys who admired her.

Joanna watched her rather anxiously. She tried to persuade herself that Ellen was happy and no longer craved for the alien soil from which she had been uprooted. But there was no denying her own disappointment. A lady was not the wonderful being Joanna Godden had always imagined. Ellen refused to sit in impressive idleness on the parlour sofa, not because she disapproved of idleness, but because she disapproved of the parlour and the sofa. She despised Joanna’s admirers, those stout, excellent men she was so proud of, who had asked her in marriage, “as no one ull ever ask you, Ellen Godden, if you give yourself such airs.” And worst of all, she despised her sister ... her old Jo, on whose back she had ridden, in whose arms she had slept.... Those three years of polite education seemed to have wiped out all the fifteen years of happy, homely childhood. Sometimes Joanna wished she had never sent her to a grand school. All they had done there was to stuff her head with nonsense. It would have been better, after all, if she had gone to the National, and learned to say her Catechism instead of to despise her home.

Se

One day early in October the Vines asked Ellen to go with them into Rye and visit Lord John Sanger’s menagerie.

Joanna was delighted that her sister should go a wild beast show was the ideal of entertainment on the Three Marshes.

“You can put on your best gown, Ellen the blue one Miss Godfrey made you. You’ve never been to Lord John Sanger’s before, have you? I’d like to go myself, but Wednesday’s the day for Romney, and I just about can’t miss this market. I hear they’re sending up some heifers from Orgarswick, and there’ll be sharp bidding.... I envy you going to a wild beast show. I haven’t been since Arthur Alce took me in ’93. That was the first time he asked me to marry him. I’ve never had the time to go since, though Sanger’s been twice since then, and they had Buffalo Bill in Cadborough meadow.... I reckon you’ll see some fine riding and some funny clowns and there’ll be stalls where you can buy things, and maybe a place where you can get a cup of tea. You go and enjoy yourself, duckie.”

Ellen smiled a wan smile.

On Monday night the news came to the Vines that their eldest son, Bill, who was in an accountant’s office at Maidstone, had died suddenly of peritonitis. Of course Wednesday’s jaunt was impossible, and Joanna talked as if young Bill’s untimely end had been an act of premeditated spite.

“If only he’d waited till Thursday even Wednesday morning ud have done ... the telegram wouldn’t have got to them till after they’d left the house, and Ellen ud have had her treat.”

Ellen bore the deprivation remarkably well, but Joanna fumed and champed. “I call it a shame,” she said to Arthur Alce, “an unaccountable shame, spoiling the poor child’s pleasure. It’s seldom she gets anything she likes, with all her refined notions, but here you have, as you might say, amusement and instruction combined. If only I hadn’t got that tedious market ... but go I must; it’s not a job I can give to Broadhurst, bidding for them heifers and I mean to have ’em. I hear Furnese is after ’em, but he can’t bid up to me.”

“Would you like me to take Ellen to the wild beast show?” said Arthur Alce.

“Oh, Arthur that’s middling kind of you, that’s neighbourly. But aren’t you going into Romney yourself?”

“I’ve nothing particular to go for. I don’t want to buy. If I went it ud only be to look at stock.”

“Well, I’d take it as a real kindness if you’d drive in Ellen to Rye on Wednesday. The show’s there only for the one day, and nobody else is going up from these parts save the Cobbs, and I don’t want Ellen to go along with them ’cos of that Tom Cobb what’s come back and up to no good.”

“I’m only too pleased to do anything for you, Joanna, as you know well.”

“Yes, I know it well. You’ve been a hem good neighbour to me, Arthur.”

“A neighbour ain’t so good as I’d like to be.”

“Oh, don’t you git started on that again I thought you’d done.”

“I’ll never have done of that.”

Joanna looked vexed. Alce’s wooing had grown stale, and no longer gratified her. She could not help comparing his sandy-haired sedateness with her memories of Martin’s fire and youth that dead sweetheart had made it impossible for her to look at a man who was not eager and virile; her admirers were now all, except for him, younger than herself. She liked his friendship, his society, his ready and unselfish support, but she could not bear to think of him as a suitor, and there was almost disdain in her eyes.

“I don’t like to hear such talk from you,” she said coldly. Then she remembered the silver tea-set which he had never taken back, and the offer he had made just now.... “Not but that you ain’t a good friend to me, Arthur my best.”

A faint pink crept under his freckles and tan.

“Well, I reckon that should ought to be enough for me to hear you say that.”

“I do say it. And now I’ll go and tell Ellen you’re taking her into Rye for the show. She’ll be a happy girl.”

Se

Ellen was not quite so happy as her sister expected. Her sum of spectacular bliss stood in Shakespearean plays which she had seen, and in “Monsieur Beaucaire,” which she had not. A wild beast show with its inevitable accompaniment of dust and chokiness and noise would give her no pleasure at all, and the slight interest which had lain in the escort of the Vines with the amorous Stacey was now removed. She did not want Arthur Alce’s company. Her sister’s admirer struck her as a dull dog.

“I won’t trouble him,” she said. “I’m sure he doesn’t really want to go.”

“Reckon he does,” said Joanna. “He wants to go anywhere that pleases me.”

This did not help to reconcile Ellen.

“Well, I don’t want to be taken anywhere just to please you.”

“It pleases you too, don’t it?”

“No, it doesn’t. I don’t care twopence about fairs and shows, and Arthur Alce bores me.”

This double blasphemy temporarily deprived Joanna of speech.

“If he’s only taking me to please you,” continued Ellen, “he can just leave me at home to please myself.”

“What nonsense!” cried her sister “here have I been racking around for hours just to fix a way of getting you to the show, and now you say you don’t care about it.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Then you should ought to. I never saw such airs as you give yourself. Not care about Sanger’s World Wide Show! I tell you, you just about shall go to it, ma’am, whether you care about it or not, and Arthur Alce shall take you.”

Thus the treat was arranged, and on Wednesday afternoon Alce drove to the door in his high, two-wheeled dog-cart, and Ellen climbed up beside him, under the supervision of Mrs. Tolhurst, whom Joanna, before setting out for market, had commissioned to “see as she went.” Not that Joanna could really bring herself to believe that Ellen was truthful in saying she did not care about the show, but she thought it possible that sheer contrariness might keep her away.

Ellen was wearing her darkest, demurest clothes, in emphatic contrast to the ribbons and laces in which Brodnyx and Pedlinge usually went to the fair. Her hair was neatly coiled under her little, trim black hat, and she wore dark suede gloves and buckled shoes. Alce felt afraid of her, especially as during the drive she never opened her mouth except in brief response to some remark of his.

Ellen despised Arthur Alce she did not like his looks, his old-fashioned side-whiskers and Gladstone collars, or the amount of hair and freckles that covered the exposed portions of his skin. She despised him, too, for his devotion to Joanna; she did not understand how a man could be inspired with a lifelong love for Joanna, who seemed to her unattractive coarse and bouncing. She also a little resented this devotion, the way it was accepted as an established fact in the neighbourhood, a standing sum to Joanna’s credit. Of course she was fond of her sister she could not help it but she would have forgiven her more easily for her ruthless domineering, if she had not also had the advantage in romance. An admirer who sighed hopelessly after you all your life was still to Ellen the summit of desire. It was fortunate that she could despise Alce so thoroughly in his person, or else she might have found herself jealous of her sister.

They arrived at Sanger’s in good time for the afternoon performance, and their seats were the best in the tent. Alce, ever mindful of Joanna, bought Ellen an orange and a bag of bull’s-eyes. During the performance he was too much engrossed to notice her much the elephants, the clowns, the lovely ladies, were as fresh and wonderful to him as to any child present, though as a busy farmer he had long ago discarded such entertainments and would not have gone to-day if it had not been for Ellen, or rather for her sister. When the interval came, however, he had time to notice his companion, and it seemed to him that she drooped.

“Are you feeling it hot in here?”

“Yes it’s very close.”

He did not offer to take her out it did not strike him that she could want to leave.

“You haven’t sucked your orange that’ll freshen you a bit.”

Ellen looked at her orange.

“Let me peel it for you,” said Alce, noticing her gloved hands.

“Thanks very much but I can’t eat it here; there’s nowhere to put the skin and pips.”

“What about the floor? Reckon they sweep out the sawdust after each performance.”

“I’m sure I hope they do,” said Ellen, whose next-door neighbour had spat at intervals between his knees, “but really, I’d rather keep the orange till I get home.”

At that moment the ring-master came in to start the second half of the entertainment, and Alce turned away from Ellen. He was unconscious of her till the band played “God Save the King,” and there was a great scraping of feet as the audience turned to go out.

“We’ll go and have a cup of tea,” said Alce.

He took her into the refreshment tent, and blundered as far as offering her a twopenny ice-cream at the ice-cream stall. He was beginning to realize that she took her pleasures differently from most girls he knew; he felt disappointed and ill at ease with her it would be dreadful if she went home and told Joanna she had not enjoyed herself.

“What would you like to do now?” he asked when they had emptied their tea-cups and eaten their stale buns in the midst of a great steaming, munching squash “there’s swings and stalls and a merry-go-round and I hear the Fat Lady’s the biggest they’ve had yet in Rye; but maybe you don’t care for that sort of thing?”

“No, I don’t think I do, and I’m feeling rather tired. We ought to be starting back before long.”

“Oh, not till you’ve seen all the sights. Joanna ud never forgive me if I didn’t show you the sights. We’ll just stroll around, and then we’ll go to the George and have the trap put to.”

Ellen submitted she was a born submitter, whose resentful and watchful submission had come almost to the pitch of art. She accompanied Alce to the swings, though she would not go up in them, and to the merry-go-round, though she would not ride in it.

“There’s Ellen Godden out with her sister’s young man,” said a woman’s voice in the crowd.

“Maybe he’ll take the young girl now he can’t get the old ’un,” a man answered her.

“Oh, Arthur Alce ull never change from Joanna Godden.”

“But the sister’s a dear liddle thing, better worth having to my mind.”

“Still, I’ll never believe ...”

The voices were lost in the crowd, and Ellen never knew who had spoken, but for the first time that afternoon her boredom was relieved. It was rather pleasant to have anyone think that Arthur Alce was turning to her from Joanna ... it would be a triumph indeed if he actually did turn ... for the first time she began to take an interest in him.

The crowd was very thick, and Alce offered her his arm.

“Hook on to me, or maybe I’ll lose you.”

Ellen did as he told her, and after a time he felt her weight increase.

“Reckon you’re middling tired.”

He looked down on her with a sudden pity her little hand was like a kitten under his arm.

“Yes, I am rather tired.” It was no pretence such an afternoon, without the stimulant and sustenance of enjoyment, was exhausting indeed.

“Then we’ll go home reckon we’ve seen everything.”

He piloted her out of the crush, and they went to the George, where the trap was soon put to. Ellen sat drooping along the Straight Mile.

“Lord, but you’re hem tired,” said Alce, looking down at her.

“I’ve got a little headache I had it when I started.”

“Then you shouldn’t ought to have come.”

“Joanna said I was to.”

“You should have told her about your head.”

“I did but she said I must come all the same. I said I was sure you wouldn’t mind, but she wouldn’t let me off.”

“Joanna’s valiant for getting her own way. Still, it was hard on you, liddle girl, making you come I shouldn’t have taken offence.”

“I know you wouldn’t. But Jo’s so masterful. She always wants me to enjoy myself in her way, and being strong, she doesn’t understand people who aren’t.”

“That’s so, I reckon. Still your sister’s a fine woman, Ellen the best I’ve known.”

“I’m sure she is,” snapped Ellen.

“But she shouldn’t ought to have made you come this afternoon, since you were feeling poorly.”

“Don’t let out I said anything to you about it, Arthur it might make her angry. Oh, don’t make her angry with me.”

Se

During the next few weeks it seemed to Joanna that her sister was a little more alert. She went out more among the neighbours, and when Joanna’s friends came to see her, she no longer sulked remotely, but came into the parlour, and was willing to play the piano and talk and be entertaining. Indeed, once or twice when Joanna was busy she had sat with Arthur Alce after tea and made herself most agreeable so he said.

The fact was that Ellen had a new interest in life. Those words sown casually in her thoughts at the show were bearing remarkable fruit. She had pondered them well, and weighed her chances, and come to the conclusion that it would be a fine and not impossible thing to win Arthur Alce from Joanna to herself.

She did not see why she should not be able to do so. She was prettier than her sister, younger, more accomplished, better educated. Alce on his side must be tired of wooing without response. When he saw there was a chance of Ellen, he would surely take it; and then what a triumph! How people would talk and marvel when they saw Joanna Godden’s life-long admirer turn from her to her little sister! They would be forced to acknowledge Ellen as a superior and enchanting person. Of course there was the disadvantage that she did not particularly want Arthur Alce, but her schemings did not take her as far as matrimony.

She was shrewd enough to see that the best way to capture Alce was to make herself as unlike her sister as possible. With him she was like a little soft cat, languid and sleek, or else delicately playful. She appealed to his protecting strength, and in time made him realize that she was unhappy in her home life and suffered under her sister’s tyranny. She had hoped that this might help detach him from Joanna, but his affection was of that passive, tenacious kind which tacitly accepts all the faults of the beloved. He was always ready to sympathize with Ellen, and once or twice expostulated with Joanna but his loyalty showed no signs of wavering.

As time went on, Ellen began to like him more in himself. She grew accustomed to his red hair and freckles, and when he was in his everyday kit of gaiters and breeches and broadcloth, she did not find him unattractive. Moreover she could not fail to appreciate his fundamental qualities of generosity and gentleness he was like a big, faithful, gentle dog, a red-haired collie, following and serving.

Se

The weeks went by, and Ellen still persevered. But she was disappointed in results. She had thought that Alce’s subjection would not take very long, she had not expected the matter to drag. It was the fault of his crass stupidity he was unable to see what she was after, he looked upon her just as a little girl, Joanna’s little sister, and was good to her for Joanna’s sake.

This was humiliating, and Ellen fretted and chafed at her inability to make him see. She was no siren, and was without either the parts or the experience for a definite attack on his senses. She worked as an amateur and a schoolgirl, with only a certain fundamental shrewdness to guide her; she was doubtless becoming closer friends with Alce he liked to sit and talk to her after tea, and often gave her lifts in his trap but he used their intimacy chiefly to confide in her his love and admiration for her sister, which was not what Ellen wanted.

The first person to see what was happening was Joanna herself. She had been glad for some time of Ellen’s increased friendliness with Alce, but had pat it down to nothing more than the comradeship of that happy day at Lord John Sanger’s show. Then something in Ellen’s looks as she spoke to Arthur, in her manner as she spoke of him, made her suspicious and one Sunday evening, walking home from church, she became sure. The service had been at Pedlinge, in the queer barn-like church whose walls inside were painted crimson; and directly it was over Ellen had taken charge of Alce, who was coming back to supper with them. Alce usually went to his parish church at Old Romney, but had accepted Ellen’s invitation to accompany the Goddens that day, and now Ellen seemed anxious that he should not walk with her and Joanna, but had taken him on ahead, leaving Joanna to walk with the Southlands.

The elder sister watched them Alce a little oafish in his Sunday blacks, Ellen wearing her new spring hat with the daisies. As she spoke to him she lifted her face on her graceful neck like a swan, and her voice was eager and rather secret. Joanna lost the thread of Mrs. Southland’s reminiscences of her last dairy-girl, and she watched Ellen, watched her hands, watched the shrug of her shoulders under her gown the girl’s whole body seemed to be moving, not restlessly or jerkily, but with a queer soft ripple.

Then Joanna suddenly said to herself “She loves him. Ellen wants Arthur Alce.” Her first emotion was of anger, a resolve to stop this impudence; but the next minute she pitied instead Ellen, with her fragile beauty, her little die-away airs, would never be able to get Arthur Alce from Joanna, to whom he belonged. He was hers, both by choice and habit, and Ellen would never get him. Then from pity, she passed into tenderness she was sorry Ellen could not get Arthur, could not have him when she wanted him, while Joanna, who could have him, did not want him. It would be a good thing for her, too. Alce was steady and well-established he was not like those mucky young Vines and Southlands. Ellen would be safe to marry him. It was a pity she hadn’t a chance.

Joanna looked almost sentimentally at the couple ahead then she suddenly made up her mind. “If I spoke to Arthur Alce, I believe I could make him do it.” She could make Arthur do most things, and she did not see why he should stop at this. Of course she did not want Ellen to marry him or anybody, but now she had once come to think of it she could see plainly, in spite of herself, that marriage would be a good thing for her sister. She was being forced up against the fact that her schemes for Ellen had failed school-life had spoiled her, home-life was making both her and home miserable. The best thing she could do would be to marry, but she must marry a good man and true Alce was both good and true, and moreover his marriage would set Joanna free from his hang-dog devotion, of which she was beginning to grow heartily tired. She appreciated his friendship and his usefulness, but they could both survive, and she would at the same time be free of his sentimental lapses, the constant danger of a declaration. Yes, Ellen should have him she would make a present of him to Ellen.

Se

“Arthur, I want a word with you.”

They were alone in the parlour, Ellen having been dispatched resentfully on an errand to Great Ansdore.

“About them wethers?”

“No it’s a different thing. Arthur, have you noticed that Ellen’s sweet on you?”

Joanna’s approach to a subject was ever direct, but this time she seemed to have taken the breath out of Arthur’s body.

“Ellen ... sweet on me?” he gasped.

“Yes, you blind-eyed owl. I’ve seen it for a dunnamany weeks.”

“But Ellen? That liddle girl ud never care an onion for a dull, dry chap lik me.”

“Reckon she would. You ain’t such a bad chap, Arthur, though I could never bring myself to take you.”

“Well, I must say I haven’t noticed anything, or maybe I’d have spoken to you about it. I’m unaccountable sorry, Jo, and I’ll do all I can to help you stop it.”

“I’m not sure I want to stop it. I was thinking only to-day as it wouldn’t be a bad plan if you married Ellen.”

“But, Jo, I don’t want to marry anybody but you.”

“Reckon that’s middling stupid of you, for I’ll never marry you, Arthur Alce never!”

“Then I don’t want nobody.”

“Oh, yes, you do. You’ll be a fool if you don’t marry and get a wife to look after you and your house, which has wanted new window-blinds this eighteen month. You can’t have me, so you may as well have Ellen she’s next best to me, I reckon, and she’s middling sweet on you.”

“Ellen’s a dear liddle thing, as I’ve always said against them that said otherwise but I’ve never thought of marrying her, and reckon she don’t want to marry me, she’d sooner marry a stout young Southland or young Vine.”

“She ain’t going to marry any young Vine. When she marries I’ll see she marries a steady, faithful, solid chap, and you’re the best I know.”

“It’s kind of you to say it, but reckon it wouldn’t be a good thing for me to marry one sister when I love the other.”

“But you’ll never get the other, not till the moon’s cheese, so there’s no sense in vrothering about that. And I want Ellen to marry you, Arthur, since she’s after you. I never meant her to marry yet awhiles, but reckon I can’t make her happy at home I’ve tried and I can’t so you may as well try.”

“It ud be difficult to make Ellen happy she’s a queer liddle dentical thing.”

“I know, but marriage is a wonderful soberer-down. She’ll be happy once she gets a man and a house of her own.”

“I’m not so sure. Anyways I’m not the man for her. She should ought to marry a gentleman.”

“Well, there ain’t none for her to marry, nor likely to be none. She’ll go sour if she has to stand ... and she wants you, Arthur. I wouldn’t be asking you this if I hadn’t seen she wanted you, and seen too as the best thing as could happen to her would be for her to marry you.”

“I’m sure she’ll never take me.”

“You can but ask her.”

“She’ll say ‘No.’”

“Reckon she won’t but if she does, there’ll be no harm in asking her.”

“You queer me, Jo it seems a foolish thing to marry Ellen when I want to marry you.”

“But I tell you, you can never marry me. You’re a stupid man, Arthur, who won’t see things as they are. You go hankering after whom you can’t get, and all the time you might get someone who’s hankering after you. It’s a lamentable waste, I say, and I’ll never be pleased if you don’t ask Ellen. It ain’t often I ask you to do anything to please me, and this is no hard thing. Ellen’s a fine match a pretty girl, and clever, and well-taught she’ll play the piano to your friends. And I’ll see as she has a bit of money with her. You’ll do well for yourself by taking her, and I tell you, Arthur, I’m sick and tired of your dangling after me.”

Se

Joanna had many more conversations with Arthur Alce, and in the end bore down his objections. She used her tongue to such good purpose that by next Sunday he had come to see that Ellen wanted him, and that for him to marry her would be the best thing for everyone Joanna, Ellen and himself. After all, it wasn’t as if he had the slightest chance of Joanna she had made that abundantly clear, and his devotion did not feed on hope so much as on a stale content in being famous throughout three marshes as her rejected suitor. Perhaps it was not amiss that her sudden call should stir him into a more active and vital service.

In the simplicity of his heart, he saw nothing outrageous in her demands. She was troubled and anxious about Ellen, and had a right to expect him to help her solve this problem in the best way that had occurred to her. As for Ellen herself, now his attention had been called to the matter, he could see that she admired him and sought him out. Why she should do so was as much a mystery as ever he could not think why so soft and dainty and beautiful a creature should want to marry a homely chap like himself. But he did not doubt the facts, and when, at the beginning of the second week, he proposed to her, he was much less surprised at her acceptance than she was herself.

Ellen had never meant to accept him all she had wanted had been the mere proclaimable fact of his surrender; but during the last weeks the focus of her plans had shifted they had come to mean more than the gratification of her vanity. The denial of what she sought, the dragging of her schemes, the growing sense of hopelessness, had made her see just exactly how much she wanted. She would really like to marry Alce the slight physical antipathy with which she had started had now disappeared, and she felt that she would not object to him as a lover. He was, moreover, an excellent match better than any young Vines or Southlands or Furneses; as his wife she would be important and well-to-do, her triumph would be sealed, open and celebrated.... She would moreover be free. That was the strong hidden growth that had heaved up her flat little plans of a mere victory in tattle if she married she would be her own mistress, free for ever of Joanna’s tyranny. She could do what she liked with Alce she would be able to go where she liked, know whom she liked, wear what she liked; whereas with Joanna all these things were ruthlessly decreed. Of course she was fond of Jo, but she was tired of living with her you couldn’t call your soul your own she would never be happy till she had made herself independent of Jo, and only marriage would do that. She was tired of sulking and submitting she could make a better life for herself over at Donkey Street than she could at Ansdore. Of course if she waited she might get somebody better, but she might have to wait a long time, and she did not care for waiting. She was not old or patient or calculating enough to be a really successful schemer; her plans carried her this time only as far as a triumph over Joanna and an escape from Ansdore.

Se

Certainly her triumph was a great one. Brodnyx and Pedlinge had never expected such a thing. Their attitude had hitherto been that of the man at the fair, who would rather distrust appearances than believe Arthur Alce could change from Joanna Godden to her sister Ellen. It would have been as easy to think of the sunset changing from Rye to Court-at-Street.

There was a general opinion that Joanna had been injured though no one really doubted her sincerity when she said that she would never have taken Arthur. Her evident pleasure in the wedding was considered magnanimous it was also a little disappointing to Ellen. Not that she wanted Joanna to be miserable, but she would have liked her to be rather more sensible of her sister’s triumph, to regret rather more the honour that had been taken from her. The bear’s hug with which her sister had greeted her announcement, the eager way in which she had urged and hustled preparations for the wedding, all seemed a little incongruous and humiliating.... Joanna should at least have had some moments of realizing her fallen state.

However, what she missed at home Ellen received abroad. Some neighbours were evidently offended, especially those who had sons to mate. Mrs. Vine had been very stiff when Ellen called with Alce.

“Well, Arthur” ignoring the bride-to-be “I always felt certain you would marry Ansdore, but it was the head I thought you’d take and not the tail.”

“Oh, the tail’s good enough for me,” said Arthur, which Ellen thought clumsy of him.

Having taken the step, Arthur was curiously satisfied. His obedience in renouncing Joanna seemed to have brought him closer to her than all his long wooing. Besides, he was growing very fond of little Ellen her soft, clinging ways and little sleek airs appealed to him as those of a small following animal would, and he was proud of her cleverness, and of her prettiness, which now he had come to see, though for a long time he had not appreciated it, because it was so different from Joanna’s healthy red and brown.

He took her round the farms, not only in her own neighbourhood, but those near Donkey Street, over on Romney Marsh, across the Rhee Wall. In her honour he bought a new trap, and Ellen drove beside him in it, sitting very demure and straight. People said “There goes Ellen Godden, who’s marrying her sister’s young man,” and sometimes Ellen heard them.

She inspected Donkey Street, which was a low, plain, oblong house, covered with grey stucco, against which flamed the orange of its lichened roof. It had been built in Queen Anne’s time, and enlarged and stuccoed over about fifty years ago. It was a good, solid house, less rambling than Ansdore, but the kitchens were a little damp.

Alce bought new linen and new furniture. He had some nice pieces of old furniture too, which Ellen was very proud of. She felt she could make quite a pleasant country house of Donkey Street. In spite of Joanna’s protests, Alce let her have her own way about styles and colours, and her parlour was quite unlike anything ever seen on the Marsh outside North Farthing and Dungemarsh Court. There was no centre table and no cabinet, but a deep, comfortable sofa, which Ellen called a chesterfield, and a “cosy corner,” and a Sheraton bureau, and a Sheraton china-cupboard with glass doors. The carpet was purple, without any pattern on it, and the cushions were purple and black. For several days those black cushions were the talk of the Woolpack bar and every farm. It reminded Joanna a little of the frenzy that had greeted the first appearance of her yellow waggons, and for the first time she felt a little jealous of Ellen.

She sometimes, too, had moments of depression at the thought of losing her sister, of being once more alone at Ansdore, but having made up her mind that Ellen was to marry Arthur Alce, she was anxious to carry through the scheme as quickly and magnificently as possible. The wedding was fixed for May, and was to be the most wonderful wedding in the experience of the three marshes of Walland, Dunge and Romney. For a month Joanna’s trap spanked daily along the Straight Mile, taking her and Ellen either into Rye to the confectioner’s for Joanna had too true a local instinct to do as her sister wanted and order the cake from London or to the station for Folkestone where the clothes for both sisters were being bought. They had many a squabble over the clothes Ellen pleaded passionately for the soft, silken undergarments in the shop windows, for the little lace-trimmed drawers and chemises ... it was cruel and bigoted of Joanna to buy yards and yards of calico for nightgowns and “petticoat bodies,” with trimmings of untearable embroidery. It was also painful to be obliged to wear a saxe-blue going-away dress when she wanted an olive green, but Ellen reflected that she was submitting for the last time, and anyhow she was spared the worst by the fact that the wedding-gown must be white not much scope for Joanna there.

Se

The day before the wedding Joanna felt unusually nervous and restless. The preparations had been carried through so vigorously that everything was ready there was nothing to do, no finishing touches, and into her mind came a sudden blank and alarm. All that evening she was unable to settle down either to work or rest. Ellen had gone to bed early, convinced of the good effect of sleep on her complexion, and Joanna prowled unhappily from room to room, glancing about mechanically for dust which she knew could not be there ... the farm was just a collection of gleaming surfaces and crackling chintzes and gay, dashing colours. Everything was as she wished it, yet did not please her.

She went into her room. On the little spare bed which had once been Ellen’s lay a mass of tissue paper, veiling a marvellous gown of brown and orange shot silk, the colour of the sunburn on her cheeks, which she was to wear to-morrow when she gave the bride away. In vain had Ellen protested and said it would look ridiculous if she came down the aisle with her sister Joanna had insisted on her prerogative. “It isn’t as if we had any he-cousins fit to look at I’ll cut a better figger than either Tom or Pete Stansbury, and what right has either of them to give you away, I’d like to know?” Ellen had miserably suggested Sam Huxtable, but Joanna had fixed herself in her mind’s eye, swaggering, rustling and flaming up Pedlinge aisle, with the little drooping lily of the bride upon her arm. “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” Mr. Pratt would say “I do,” Joanna would answer. Everyone would stare at Joanna, and remember that Arthur Alce had loved her for years before he loved her sister she was certainly “giving” Ellen to him in a double sense.

She would be just as grand and important at this wedding as she could possibly have been at her own, yet to-night the prospect had ceased to thrill her. Was it because in this her first idleness she realized she was giving away something she wanted to keep? Or because she saw that, after all, being grand and important at another person’s wedding is not as good a thing even as being humble at your own?

“Well, it might have been my own if I’d liked,” she said to herself, but even that consideration failed to cheer her.

She went over to the chest of drawers. On it stood Martin’s photograph in a black velvet frame adorned with a small metal shield on which were engraved the words “Not lost but gone before.” The photograph was a little faded Martin’s eyes had lost some of their appealing darkness and the curves of the mouth she had loved were dim.... She put her face close to the faded face in the photograph, and looked at it. Gradually it blurred in a mist of tears, and she could feel her heart beating very slowly, as if each beat were an effort....

Then suddenly she found herself thinking about Ellen in a new way, with a new, strange anxiety. Martin’s fading face seemed to have taught her about Ellen, about some preparation for the wedding which might have been left out, in spite of all the care and order of the burnished house. Did she really love Arthur Alce? Did she really know what she was doing what love meant?

Joanna put down the photograph and straightened her back. She thought of her sister alone for the last time in her big flowery bedroom, lying down for the last time in the rose-curtained, mahogany bed, for her last night’s rest under Ansdore’s roof. It was the night on which, if she had not been motherless, her mother would have gone to her with love and advice. Surely on this night of all nights it was not for Joanna to shirk the mother’s part.

Her heaviness had gone, for its secret cause had been displayed no doubt this anxiety and this question had lurked with her all the evening, following her from room to room. She did not hesitate, but went down the passage to Ellen’s door, which she opened as usual without knocking.

“Not in bed, yet, duckie?”

Ellen was sitting on the bolster, in her little old plain linen nightdress buttoning to her neck, two long plaits hanging over her shoulders. The light of the rose-shaded lamp streamed on the flowery walls and floor of her compulsory bower, showing the curtains and pictures and vases and father’s Buffalo certificate showing also her packed and corded trunks, lying there like big, blobbed seals on her articles of emancipation.

“Hullo,” she said to Joanna, “I’m just going to get in.” She did not seem particularly pleased to see her.

“You pop under the clothes, and I’ll tuck you up. There’s something I want to speak to you about if you ain’t too sleepy.”

“About what?”

“About this wedding of yours.”

“You’ve spoken to me about nothing else for weeks and months.”

“But I want to speak to you different and most particular. Duckie, are you quite sure you love Arthur Alce?”

“Of course I’m sure, or I shouldn’t be marrying him.”

“There’s an unaccountable lot of reasons why any gal ud snap at Arthur. He’s got a good name and a good establishment, and he’s as mild-mannered and obliging as a cow.”

Ellen looked disconcerted at hearing her bridegroom thus defined.

“If that’s all I saw in him I shouldn’t have said ‘yes.’ I like him he’s got a kind heart and good manners, and he won’t interfere with me he’ll let me do as I please.”

“But that ain’t enough it ain’t enough for you just to like him. Do you love him? It’s struck me all of a sudden, Ellen, I’ve never made sure of that, and it ud be a lamentable job if you was to get married to Arthur without loving him.”

“But I do love him I’ve told you. And may I ask, Jo, what you’d have done if I’d said I didn’t? It’s rather late for breaking off the match.”

Joanna had never contemplated such a thing. It would be difficult to say exactly how far her plans had stretched, probably no further than the argument and moral suasion which would forcibly compel Ellen to love if she did not love already.

“No, no I’d never have you break it off with the carriages and the breakfast ordered, and my new gownd, and your troosoo and all.... But, Ellen, if you want to change your mind ... I mean, if you feel, thinking honest, that you don’t love Arthur ... for pity’s sake say so now before it’s too late. I’ll stand by you I’ll face the racket I’d sooner you did anything than ”

“Oh, don’t be an ass, Jo. Of course I don’t want to change my mind. I know what I’m doing, and I’m very fond of Arthur I love him, if you want the word. I like being with him, and I even like it when he kisses me. So you needn’t worry.”

“Marriage is more than just being kissed and having a man about the house.”

“I know it is.”

Something in the way she said it made Joanna see she was abysmally ignorant.

“Is there anything you’d like to ask me, dearie?”

“Nothing you could possibly know anything about.”

Joanna turned on her.

“I’ll learn you to sass me. You dare say such a thing!”

“Well, Jo you’re not married, and there are some things you don’t know.”

“That’s right call me an old maid! I tell you I could have made a better marriage than you, my girl.... I could have made the very marriage you’re making, for the matter of that.”

She stood up, preparing to go in anger. Then suddenly as she looked down on Ellen, fragile and lily-white among the bed-clothes, her heart smote her and she relented. This was Ellen’s last night at home.

“Don’t let’s grumble at each other. I know you and I haven’t quite hit it off, my dear, and I’m sorry, as I counted a lot on us being at Ansdore together. I thought maybe we’d be at Ansdore together all our lives. Howsumever, I reckon things are better as they are it was my own fault, trying to make a lady of you, and I’m glad it’s all well ended. Only see as it’s truly well ended, dear for Arthur’s sake as well as yours. He’s a good chap and deserves the best of you.”

Ellen was still angry, but something about Joanna as she stooped over the bed, her features obscure in the lamplight, her shadow dim and monstrous on the ceiling, made a sudden, almost reproachful appeal. A rush of genuine feeling made her stretch out her arms.

“Jo ...”

Joanna stooped and caught her to her heart, and for a moment, the last moment, the big and the little sister were as in times of old.

Se

Ellen’s wedding was the most wonderful that Brodnyx and Pedlinge had seen for years. It was a pity that the law of the land required it to take place in Pedlinge church, which was comparatively small and mean, and which indeed Joanna could never feel was so Established as the church at Brodnyx, because it had only the old harmonium, and queer paintings of angels instead of the Lion and the Unicorn.

However, Mr. Elphick ground and sweated wonders out of “the old harmonister” as it was affectionately called by the two parishes, and everyone was too busy staring at the bride and the bride’s sister to notice whether angels or King George the Third presided over the altar.

Joanna had all the success that she had longed for and expected. She walked down the aisle with Ellen white and drooping on her arm, like a sunflower escorting a lily. When Mr. Pratt said “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” she answered “I do” in a voice that rang through the church. Afterwards, she took her handkerchief out of her pocket and cried a little, as is seemly at weddings.

Turner of Northlade was Arthur Alce’s best man, and there were four bridesmaids dressed in pink Maudie Vine, Gertrude Prickett, Maggie Southland and Ivy Cobb. They carried bouquets of roses with lots of spiraea, and wore golden hearts “the gift of the bridegroom.” Altogether the brilliance of the company made up for the deficiencies of its barn-like setting and the ineffectiveness of Mr. Pratt, who, discomposed by the enveloping presence of Joanna, blundered more helplessly than ever, so that, as Joanna said afterwards, she was glad when it was all finished without anyone getting married besides the bride and bridegroom.

After the ceremony there was a breakfast at Ansdore, with a wedding-cake and ices and champagne, and waiters hired from the George Hotel at Rye. Ellen stood at the end of the room shaking hands with a long procession of Pricketts, Vines, Furneses, Southlands, Bateses, Turners, Cobbs.... She looked a little tired and droopy, for she had had a trying day, with Joanna fussing and fighting her ever since six in the morning; and now she felt resentfully that her sister had snatched the splendours of the occasion from her to herself it did not seem right that Joanna should be the most glowing, conspicuous, triumphant object in the room, and Ellen, unable to protest, sulked languishingly.

However, if the bride did not seem as proud and happy as she might, the bridegroom made up for it. There was something almost spiritual in the look of Arthur Alce’s eyes, as he stood beside Ellen, his arm held stiffly for the repose of hers, his great choker collar scraping his chin, lilies of the valley and camellias sprouting from his buttonhole, a pair of lemon kid gloves split at the first attempt, so he could only hold them clutched in his moist hand. He looked devout, exalted, as he armed his little bride and watched her sister.

“Arthur Alce looks pleased enough,” said Furnese to Mrs. Bates “reckon he sees he’s got the best of the family.”

“Maybe he’s thankful now that Joanna wouldn’t take him.”

Neither of them noticed that the glow was in Alce’s eyes chiefly when they rested on Joanna.

He knew that to-day he had pleased her better than he had ever pleased her in his life. To-day she had said to him “God bless you, Arthur you’re the best friend I have, or am like to have, neither.” To-day he had made himself her kinsman, with a dozen new opportunities of service. Chief among these was the dear little girl on his arm how pretty and sweet she was! How he would love her and cherish her as he had promised Mr. Pratt! Well, thank God, he had done Joanna one good turn, and himself not such a bad one, neither. How clever she had been to think of his marrying Ellen! He would never have thought of it himself; yet now he saw clearly that it was a wonderful notion nothing could be better. Joanna was valiant for notions.... Alce had had one glass of champagne.

At about four o’clock, Joanna dashed into the circle round the bride, and took Ellen away upstairs, to put on her travelling dress of saxe-blue satin the last humiliation she would have to endure from Ansdore. The honeymoon was being spent at Canterbury, cautiously chosen by Arthur as a place he’d been to once and so knew the lie of a bit. Ellen had wanted to go to Wales, or to the Lakes, but Joanna had sternly forbidden such outrageous pinings “Arthur’s got two cows calving next week what are you thinking of, Ellen Godden?”

The bridal couple drove away amidst much hilarity, inspired by the unaccustomed champagne and expressed in rice and confetti. After they had gone the guests still lingered, feasting at the littered tables or re-inspecting and re-valuing the presents which had been laid out, after the best style, in the dining-room. Sir Harry Trevor had sent Ellen a little pearl pendant, though he had been unable to accept Joanna’s invitation and come to the wedding himself he wrote from a London address and hinted vaguely that he might never come back to North Farthing House, which had been let furnished. His gift was the chief centre of interest when Mrs. Vine had done comparing her electro-plated cruet most favourably with the one presented by Mrs. Furnese and the ignoble china object that Mrs. Cobb had had the meanness to send, and Mrs. Bates had recovered from the shock of finding that her tea-cosy was the exact same shape and pattern as the one given by Mrs. Gain. People thought it odd that the Old Squire should send pearls to Ellen Godden something for the table would have been much more seemly.

Joanna had grown weary her shoulders drooped under her golden gown, she tossed back her head and yawned against the back of her hand. She was tired of it all, and wanted them to go. What were they staying for? They must know the price of everything pretty well by this time and have eaten enough to save their suppers. She was no polished hostess, concealing her boredom, and the company began soon to melt away. Traps lurched over the shingle of Ansdore’s drive, the Pricketts walked off across the innings to Great Ansdore, guests from Rye packed into two hired wagonettes, and the cousins from the Isle of Wight drove back to the George, where, as there were eight of them and they refused to be separated, Joanna was munificently entertaining them instead of under her own roof.

When the last was gone, she turned back into the house, where Mrs. Tolhurst stood ready with her broom to begin an immediate sweep-up after the waiters, whom she looked upon as the chief source of the disorder. A queer feeling came over Joanna, a feeling of loneliness, of craving, and she fell in all her glory of feathers and silk upon Mrs. Tolhurst’s alpaca bosom. Gone were those arbitrary and often doubtful distinctions between them, and the mistress enjoyed the luxury of a good cry in her servant’s arms.

Se

Ellen’s marriage broke into Joanna’s life quite as devastatingly as Martin’s death. Though for more than three years her sister had been away at school, with an ever-widening gulf of temperament between herself and the farm, and though since her return she had been little better at times than a rebellious and sulky stranger, nevertheless she was a part of Ansdore, a part of Joanna’s life there, and the elder sister found it difficult to adjust things to her absence.

Of course Ellen had not gone very far Donkey Street was not five miles from Ansdore, though in a different parish and a different county. But the chasm between them was enormous it was queer to think that a mere change of roof-tree could make such a difference. No doubt the reason was that with Ellen it had involved an entire change of habit. While she lived with Joanna she had been bound both by the peculiarities of her sister’s nature and her own to accept her way of living. She had submitted, not because she was weak or gentle-minded but because submission was an effective weapon of her welfare; now, having no further use for it, she ruled instead and was another person. She was, besides, a married woman, and the fact made all the difference to Ellen herself. She felt herself immeasurably older and wiser than Joanna, her teacher and tyrant. Her sister’s life seemed to her puerile.... Ellen had at last read the riddle of the universe and the secret of wisdom.

The sisters’ relations were also a little strained over Arthur Alce. Joanna resented the authority that Ellen assumed it took some time to show her that Arthur was no longer hers. She objected when Ellen made him shave off his moustache and whiskers; he looked ten years younger and a far handsomer man, but he was no longer the traditional Arthur Alce of Joanna’s history, and she resented it. Ellen on her part resented the way Joanna still made use of him, sending him to run errands and make inquiries for her just as she used in the old days before his marriage. “Arthur, I hear there’s some good pigs going at Honeychild auction I can’t miss market at Lydd, but you might call round and have a look for me.” Or “Arthur, I’ve a looker’s boy coming from Abbot’s Court you might go there for his characters, I haven’t time, with the butter-making to-day and Mene Tekel such an owl.”

Ellen rebelled at seeing her husband ordered about, and more than once “told off” her sister, but Joanna had no intention of abandoning her just claims in Arthur, and the man himself was pig-headed “I mun do what I can for her, just as I used.” Ellen could make him shave off his whiskers, she could even make him on occasion young and fond and frolicsome, but she could not make him stop serving Joanna, or, had she only known it, stop loving her. Arthur was perfectly happy as Ellen’s husband, and made her, as Joanna had foretold, an exemplary one, but his love for Joanna seemed to grow rather than diminish as he cared for and worked for and protected her sister. It seemed to feed and thrive on his love for Ellen it gave him a wonderful sense of action and effectiveness, and people said what a lot of good marriage had done for Arthur Alce, and that he was no longer the dull chap he used to be.

Se

It had done Ellen a lot of good too. During the next year she blossomed and expanded. She lost some of her white looks. The state of marriage suited her thoroughly well. Being her own mistress and at the same time having a man to take care of her, having an important and comfortable house of her own, ordering about her own servants and spending her husband’s money, such things made her life pleasant, and checked the growth of peevishness that had budded at Ansdore.

During the first months of her marriage, Joanna went fairly often to see her, one reason being the ache which Ellen’s absence had left in her heart she wanted to see her sister, sit with her, hear her news. Another reason was the feeling that Ellen, a beginner in the ways of life and household management, still needed her help and guidance. Ellen soon undeceived her on this point. “I really know how to manage my own house, Joanna,” she said once or twice when the other commented and advised, and Joanna had been unable to enforce her ideas, owing to the fact that she seldom saw Ellen above once or twice a week. Her sister could do what she liked in her absence, and it was extraordinary how definite and cocksure the girl was about things she should have approached in the spirit of meekness and dependence on her elders.

“I count my linen after it is aired it comes in at such an inconvenient time that I can’t attend to it then. The girls can easily hang it out on the horse really, Joanna, one must trust people to do something.”

“Well, then, don’t blame me when you’re a pillowcase short.”

“I certainly shan’t blame you,” said Ellen coolly.

Joanna felt put out and injured. It hurt her to see that Ellen did not want her supervision she had looked forward to managing Donkey Street as well as Ansdore. She tried to get a hold on Ellen through Arthur Alce.

“Arthur, it’s your duty to see Ellen don’t leave the bread-making to that cook-gal of hers. I never heard of such a notion her laying on the sofa while the gal wastes coal and flour.” ... “Arthur, Ellen needs a new churn let her get a Wallis. It’s a shame for her to be buying new cushions when her churn’s an old butter-spoiler I wouldn’t use if I was dead Arthur, you’re there with her, and you can make her do what I say.”

But Arthur could not, any more than Joanna, make Ellen do what she did not want. He had always been a mild-mannered man, and he found Ellen, in her different way, quite as difficult to stand up to as her sister.

“I’m not going to have Jo meddling with my affairs,” she would say with a toss of her head.

Se

Another thing that worried Joanna was the fact that the passing year brought no expectations to Donkey Street. One of her happiest anticipations in connexion with Ellen’s marriage was her having a dear little baby whom Joanna could hug and spoil and teach. Perhaps it would be a little girl, and she would feel like having Ellen over again.

She was bitterly disappointed when Ellen showed no signs of obliging her quickly, and indeed quite shocked by her sister’s expressed indifference on the matter.

“I don’t care about children, Jo, and I’m over young to have one of my own.”

“Young! You’re rising twenty, and mother was but eighteen when I was born.”

“Well, anyhow, I don’t see why I should have a child just because you want one.”

“I don’t want one. For shame to say such things, Ellen Alce.”

“You want me to have one, then, for your benefit.”

“Don’t you want one yourself?”

“No not now. I’ve told you I don’t care for children.”

“Then you should ought to! Dear little mites! It’s a shame to talk like that. Oh, what wouldn’t I give, Ellen, to have a child of yours in my arms.”

“Why don’t you marry and have one of your own?”

Joanna coloured.

“I don’t want to marry.”

“But you ought to marry if that’s how you feel. Why don’t you take a decent fellow like, say, Sam Turner, even if you don’t love him, just so that you may have a child of your own? You’re getting on, you know, Joanna nearly thirty-four you haven’t much time to waste.”

“Well it ain’t my fault,” said Joanna tearfully, “that I couldn’t marry the man I wanted to. I’d have been married more’n five year now if he hadn’t been took. And it’s sorter spoiled the taste for me, as you might say. I don’t feel inclined to get married it don’t take my fancy, and I don’t see how I’m ever going to bring myself to do it. That’s why it ud be so fine for me if you had a little one, Ellen as I could hold and kiss and care for and feel just as if it was my own.”

“Thanks,” said Ellen.

Se

The winding up of her plans for her sister made it necessary that Joanna should cast about for fresh schemes to absorb her energies. The farm came to her rescue in this fresh, more subtle collapse, and she turned to it as vigorously as she had turned after Martin’s death, and with an increase of that vague feeling of bitterness which had salted her relations with it ever since.

A strong rumour was blowing on the Marsh that shortly Great Ansdore would come into the market. Joanna’s schemes at once were given their focus. She would buy Great Ansdore if she had the chance. She had always resented its presence, so inaptly named, on the fringe of Little Ansdore’s greatness. If she bought it, she would be adding more than fifty acres to her own, but it was good land Prickett was a fool not to have made more of it and the possession carried with it manorial rights, including the presentation of the living of Brodnyx with Pedlinge. When Joanna owned Great Ansdore in addition to her own thriving and established patrimony, she would be a big personage on the Three Marshes, almost “county.” No tenant or yeoman from Dymchurch to Winchelsea, from Romney to the coast, would dare withhold his respect she might even at last be admitted a member of the Farmers’ Club....

It was characteristic of her that, with this purchase in view, she made no efforts to save money. She set out to make it instead, and her money-making was all of the developing, adventurous kind she ploughed more grass, and decided to keep three times the number of cows and open a milk-round.

As a general practice only a few cows were kept on the Marsh farms, for, owing to the shallowness of the dykes, it was difficult to prevent their straying. However, Joanna boldly decided to fence all the Further Innings. She could spare that amount of grazing, and though she would have to keep down the numbers of her sheep till after she had bought Great Ansdore, she expected to make more money out of the milk and dairy produce she might even in time open a dairy business in Rye. This would involve the engaging of an extra girl for the dairy and chickens, and an extra man to help Broadhurst with the cows, but Joanna was undaunted. She enjoyed a gamble, when it was not merely a question of luck, but also in part a matter of resource and planning and hard driving pace.

“There’s Joanna Godden saving her tin to buy Great Ansdore,” said Bates of Picknye Bush to Cobb of Slinches, as they watched her choosing her shorthorns at Romney. She had Arthur Alce beside her, and he was, as in the beginning, trying to persuade her to be a little smaller in her ideas, but, as in the beginning, she would not listen.

“Setting up cow-keeping now, is she? Will she make as much a valiant wonder of that as she did with her sheep? Ha! ha!”

“Ha! ha!” The two men laughed and winked and rubbed their noses, for they liked to remember the doleful tale of Joanna’s first adventure at Ansdore; it made them able to survey more equably her steady rise in glory ever since.

It was obvious to Walland Marsh that, on the whole, her big ideas had succeeded where the smaller, more cautious ones of her neighbours had failed. Of course she had been lucky luckier than she deserved but she was beginning to make men wonder if after all there wasn’t policy in paying a big price for a good thing, rather than in obeying the rules of haggle which maintained on other farms. Ansdore certainly spent half as much again as Birdskitchen or Beggar’s Bush or Misleham or Yokes Court, but then it had nearly twice as much to show for it. Joanna was not the woman who would fail to keep pace with her own prosperity her swelling credit was not recorded merely in her pass-book; it was visible, indeed dazzling, to every eye.

She had bought a new trap and mare a very smart turn-out, with rubber tires and chocolate-coloured upholstery, while the mare herself had blood in her, and a bit of the devil too, and upset the sleepy, chumbling rows of farmers’ horses waiting for their owners in the streets of Lydd or Rye. Old Stuppeny had died in the winter following Ellen’s marriage, and had been lavishly buried, with a tombstone, and an obituary notice in the Rye Observer, at Joanna’s expense. In his place she had now one of those good-looking, rather saucy-eyed young men, whom she liked to have about her in a menial capacity. He wore a chocolate-coloured livery made by a tailor in Marlingate, and sat on the seat behind Joanna with his arms folded across his chest, as she spanked along the Straight Mile.

Joanna was now thirty-three years old, and in some ways looked older than her age, in others younger. Her skin, richly weather-beaten into reds and browns, and her strong, well-developed figure in its old-fashioned stays, made her look older than her eyes, which had an expectant, childish gravity in their brightness, and than her mouth, which was still a young woman’s mouth, large, eager, full-lipped, with strong, little, white teeth. Her hair was beautiful it had no sleekness, but, even in its coils, looked rough and abundant, and it had the same rich, apple-red colours in it as her skin.

She still had plenty of admirers, for the years had made her more rather than less desirable in herself, and men had grown used to her independence among them. Moreover, she was a “catch,” a maid with money, and this may have influenced the decorous, well-considered offers she had about this time from farmers inland as well as on the Marsh. She refused them decidedly nevertheless, it was obvious that she was well pleased to have been asked; these solid, estimable proposals testified to a quality in her life which had not been there before.

Yes she had done well for herself on the whole, she thought. Looking back over her life, over the ten years she had ruled at Ansdore, she saw success consistently rewarding hard work and high ambition. She saw, too, strange gaps parts of the road which had grown dim in her memory, parts where probably there had been a turning, where she might have left this well-laid, direct and beaten highway for more romantic field-paths. It was queer, when she came to think of it, that nothing in her life had been really successful except Ansdore, that directly she had turned off her high-road she had become at once as it were bogged and lantern-led. Socknersh ... Martin ... Ellen ... there had been by-ways, dim paths leading into queer unknown fields, a strange beautiful land, which now she would never know.

Se

Ellen watched her sister’s thriving. “She’s almost a lady,” she said to herself, “and it’s wasted on her.” She was inclined to be dissatisfied with her own position in local society. When she had first married she had not thought it would be difficult to get herself accepted as “county” in the new neighbourhood, but she had soon discovered that she had had far more consequence as Joanna Godden’s sister than she would ever have as Arthur Alce’s wife. Even in those days Little Ansdore had been a farm of the first importance, and Joanna was at least notorious where she was not celebrated; but Donkey Street held comparatively humble rank in a district overshadowed by Dungemarsh Court, and Arthur was not the man to push himself into consideration, though Ellen had agreed that half her marriage portion should be spent on the improvement of his farm.

No one of any consequence had called upon her, though her drawing-room, with its black cushions and Watts pictures, was more fit to receive the well-born and well-bred than Joanna’s disgraceful parlour of oleographs and aspidistras and stuffed owls. The Parson had “visited” Mrs. Alce a few weeks after her arrival, but a “visit” is not a call, and when at the end of three months his wife still ignored her existence, Ellen made Arthur come over with her to Brodnyx and Pedlinge on the Sundays she felt inclined to go to church, saying that she did not care for their ways at Romney, where they had a lot of ceremonial centering round the alms-dish.

It was bitter for her to have to watch Joanna’s steady rise in importance the only respect in which she felt bitter towards her sister, since it was the only respect in which she felt inferior to her. After a time, Joanna discovered this. At first she had enjoyed pouring out her triumphs to Ellen on her visits to Donkey Street, or on the rarer occasions when Ellen visited Ansdore.

“Yes, my dear, I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to give a dinner-party a late dinner-party. I shall ask the people to come at seven, and then not have dinner till the quarter, so as there’ll be no chance of the food being kept waiting. I shall have soup and meat and a pudding, and wine to drink.”

“Who are you going to invite?” asked Ellen, with a curl of her lip.

“Why, didn’t I tell you? Sir Harry Trevor’s coming back to North Farthing next month. Mrs. Tolhurst got it from Peter Crouch, who had it from the Woolpack yesterday. He’s coming down with his married sister, Mrs. Williams, and I’ll ask Mr. Pratt, so as there’ll be two gentlemen and two ladies. I’d ask you, Ellen, only I know Arthur hasn’t got an evening suit.”

“Thanks. I don’t care about dinner-parties. Who’s going to do your waiting?”

“Mene Tekel. She’s going to wear a cap, and stand in the room all the time.”

“I hope that you’ll be able to hear yourselves talk through her breathing.”

It struck Joanna that Ellen was not very cordial.

“I believe you want to come,” she said, “and I tell you, duckie, I’ll try and manage it. It doesn’t matter about Arthur not having proper clothes I’ll put ‘evening dress optional’ on the invitations.”

“I shouldn’t do that,” said Ellen, and laughed in a way that made Joanna feel uncomfortable. “I really don’t want to come in the least it would be very dreary driving to and fro.”

“Then what’s the matter, dearie?”

“Matter? There’s nothing the matter.”

But Joanna knew that Ellen felt sore, and failing to discover the reason herself at last applied to Arthur Alce.

“If you ask me,” said Arthur, “it’s because she’s only a farmer’s wife.”

“Why should that upset her all of a sudden?”

“Well, folks don’t give her the consequence she’d like; and now she sees you having gentry at your table ...”

“I’d have had her at it too, only she didn’t want to come, and you haven’t got the proper clothes. Arthur, if you take my advice, you’ll go into Lydd this very day and buy yourself an evening suit.”

“Ellen won’t let me. She says I’d look a clown in it.”

“Ellen’s getting very short. What’s happened to her these days?”

“It’s only that she likes gentlefolk and is fit to mix with them; and after all, Jo, I’m nothing but a pore common man.”

“I hope you don’t complain of her, Arthur?”

“Oh, no I’ve no complaints don’t you think it. And don’t you go saying anything to her, Jo.”

“Then what am I to do about it? I won’t have her troubling you, nor herself, neither. I tell you what I’ll do look here! I I ” Joanna gave a loud sacrificial gulp “I’ll make it middle-day dinner instead of late, and then you won’t have to wear evening dress, and Ellen can come and meet the Old Squire. She should ought to, seeing as he gave her a pearl locket when she was married. It won’t be near so fine as having it in the evening, but I don’t want neither her nor you to be upset and I can always call it ‘lunch’ ...”

Se

As the result of Joanna’s self-denial, Ellen and Arthur were able to meet Sir Harry Trevor and his sister at luncheon at Ansdore. The luncheon did not differ in any respect from the dinner as at first proposed. There was soup much to Ellen’s annoyance, as Arthur had never been able to master the etiquette of its consumption and a leg of mutton and roast fowls, and a large fig pudding, washed down with some really good wine, for Joanna had asked the wine-merchant at Rye uncompromisingly for his best “I don’t mind what I pay so long as it’s that” and had been served accordingly. Mene Tekel waited, with creaking stays and shoes, and loud breaths down the visitors’ necks as she thrust vegetable dishes and sauce-boats at perilous angles over their shoulders.

Ellen provided a piquant contrast to her surroundings. As she sat there in her soft grey dress, with her eyes cast down under her little town hat, with her quiet voice, and languid, noiseless movements, anything more unlike the average farmer’s wife of the district was difficult to imagine. Joanna felt annoyed with her for dressing up all quiet as a water-hen, but she could see that, in spite of it, her sacrifice in having her party transferred from the glamorous evening hour had been justified. Both the Old Squire and his sister were obviously interested in Ellen Alce he in the naïve unguarded way of the male, she more subtly and not without a dash of patronage.

Mrs. Williams always took an interest in any woman she thought downtrodden, as her intuition told her Ellen was by that coarse, hairy creature, Arthur Alce. She herself had disposed of an unsatisfactory husband with great decision and resource, and, perhaps as a thank-offering, had devoted the rest of her life to woman’s emancipation. She travelled about the country lecturing for a well-known suffrage society, and was bitterly disappointed in Joanna Godden because she expressed herself quite satisfied without the vote.

“But don’t you feel it humiliating to see your carter and your cowman and your shepherd boy all go up to Rye to vote on polling-day, while you, who own this farm, and have such a stake in the country, aren’t allowed to do so?”

“It only means as I’ve got eight votes instead of one,” said Joanna, “and don’t have the trouble of going to the poll, neither. Not one of my men would dare vote but as I told him, so reckon I do better than most at the elections.”

Mrs. Williams told Joanna that it was such opinions which were keeping back the country from some goal unspecified.

“Besides, you have to think of other women, Miss Godden other women who aren’t so fortunate and independent as yourself.”

She gave a long glance at Ellen, whose downcast eyelids flickered.

“I don’t care about other women,” said Joanna, “if they won’t stand up for themselves, I can’t help them. It’s easy enough to stand up to a man. I don’t think much of men, neither. I like ’em, but I can’t think any shakes of their doings. That’s why I’d sooner they did their own voting and mine too. Now, Mene Tekel, can’t you see the Squire’s ate all his cabbage? You hand him the dish again not under his chin he don’t want to eat out of it but low down, so as he can get hold of the spoon....”

Joanna looked upon her luncheon party as a great success, and her pleasure was increased by the fact that soon after it Sir Harry Trevor and his sister paid a ceremonial call on Ellen at Donkey Street.

“Now she’ll be pleased,” thought Joanna, “it’s always what she’s been hankering after having gentlefolk call on her and leave their cards. It ain’t my fault it hasn’t happened earlier.... I’m unaccountable glad she met them at my house. It’ll learn her to think prouder of me.”

Se

That spring and summer Sir Harry Trevor was a good deal at North Farthing, and it was rumoured on the Marsh that he had run through the money so magnanimously left him and had been driven home to economize. Joanna did not see as much of him as in the old days he had given up his attempts at farming, and had let off all the North Farthing land except the actual garden and paddock. He came to see her once or twice, and she went about as rarely to see him. It struck her that he had changed in many ways, and she wondered a little where he had been and what he had done during the last four years. He did not look any older. Some queer, rather unpleasant lines had traced themselves at the corners of his mouth and eyes, but strangely enough, though they added to his characteristic air of humorous sophistication, they also added to his youth, for they were lines of desire, of feeling ... perhaps in his four years of absence from the Marsh he had learned how to feel at last, and had found youth instead of age in the commotions which feeling brings. Though he must be fifty-five, he looked scarcely more than forty and he had a queer, weak, loose, emotional air about him that she found it hard to account for.

In the circumstances she did not press invitations upon him, she had no time to waste on men who did not appreciate her as a woman which the Squire, in spite of his susceptibility, obviously failed to do. From June to August she met him only once, and that was at Ellen’s. Neither did she see very much of Ellen that summer her life was too full of hard work, as a substitute for economy.

Curiously enough next time she went to see her sister Sir Harry was there again.

“Hullo! I always seem to be meeting you here,” she said “and nowhere else you never come to see me now.”

Sir Harry grinned.

“You’re always so mortal busy, Jo I’d feel in your way. Now this little woman never seems to have much to do. You’re a lazy little thing, Ellen I don’t believe you ever move off the sofa, except to the piano.”

Joanna was surprised to see him on such familiar terms with her sister “Ellen,” indeed! He’d no right to call her that.

“Mrs. Alce hasn’t nothing beyond her housework to do and any woman worth her keep ’ull get shut of that in the morning. Now I’ve got everything on my hands and I’ve no good, kind Arthur to look after me neither,” and Joanna beamed on Arthur Alce as he stirred his tea at the end of the table.

“And jolly thankful you are that you haven’t,” said the Squire. “Own up, Joanna, and say that the last thing you’d want in life would be someone to look after you.”

“Well, it strikes me,” said Joanna, “as most of the people I meet want looking after themselves, and it ’ud be just about waste for any of ’em to start looking after me.”

Arthur Alce unexpectedly murmured something that sounded like “Hear, hear.”

When Joanna left, he brought round her trap, as the saucy-eyed young groom was having a day off in Rye.

“How’ve your turnips done?” he asked.

“Not so good as last year, but the wurzels are fine.”

“Mine might be doing better” he stood fumbling with a trace-buckle.

“Has that come loose?” asked Joanna.

“Nun-no. I hope your little lady liked her oats.”

“She looks in good heart watch her tugging. You’ve undone that buckle, Arthur.”

“So I have I was just fidgeting.”

He fastened the strap again, his fingers moving clumsily and slowly. It struck her that he was trying to gain time, that he wanted to tell her something.

“Anything the matter, Arthur?”

“Nothing why?”

“Oh, it struck me you looked worried.”

“What should I be worried about?”

“There’s a lot of things you might be worried about. What did you tell me about your wurzels?”

“They’re not so bad.”

“Then I can’t see as there’s any need for you to look glum.”

“No more there ain’t,” said Arthur in the voice of a man making a desperate decision.

Se

It was not till nearly a month later that Joanna heard that people were “talking” about Ellen and Sir Harry. Gossip generally took some time to reach her, owing to her sex, which was not privileged to frequent the Woolpack bar, where rumours invariably had a large private circulation before they were finally published at some auction or market. She resented this disability, but in spite of the general daring of her outlook and behaviour, nothing would have induced her to enter the Woolpack save by the discreet door of the landlady’s parlour, where she occasionally sipped a glass of ale. However, she had means of acquiring knowledge, though not so quickly as those women who were provided with husbands and sons. On this occasion Mene Tekel Fagge brought the news, through the looker at Slinches, with whom she was walking out.

“That’ll do, Mene,” said Joanna to her handmaiden, “you always was the one to pick up idle tales, and Dansay should ought to be ashamed of himself, drinking and talking the way he does. Now you go and tell Peter Crouch to bring me round the trap.”

She drove off to Donkey Street, carrying her scandal to its source. She was extremely angry not that for one moment she believed in the truth of those accusations brought against her sister, but Ellen was just the sort of girl, with her airs and notions, to get herself talked about at the Woolpack, and it was disgraceful to have such things said about one, even if they were not true. There was a prickly heat of shame in Joanna’s blood as she hustled the mare over the white loops of the Romney road.

The encounter with Ellen made her angrier still.

“I don’t care what they say,” said her sister, “why should I mind what a public-house bar says against me?”

“Well, you should ought to mind it’s shameful.”

“They’ve said plenty against you.”

“Not that sort of thing.”

“I’d rather have that sort of thing said about me than some.”

“Ellen!”

“Well, the Squire’s isn’t a bad name to have coupled with mine, if they must couple somebody’s.”

“I wonder you ain’t afraid of being struck dead, talking like that you with the most kind, good-tempered and lawful husband that ever was.”

“Do you imagine that I’m disloyal to Arthur?”

“Howsumever could you think I’d dream of such a thing?”

“Well, it’s the way you’re talking.”

“It ain’t.”

“Then why are you angry?”

“Because you shouldn’t ought to get gossiped about like that.”

“It isn’t my fault.”

“It is. You shouldn’t ought to have Sir Harry about the place as much as you do. The last two times I’ve been here, he’s been too.”

“I like him he amuses me.”

“I like him too, but he ain’t worth nothing, and he’s got a bad name. You get shut of him, Ellen I know him, and I know a bit about him; he ain’t the sort of man to have coming to your house when folks are talking.”

“You have him to yours whenever you can get him.”

“But then I’m a single woman, and he being a single man there’s no harm in it.”

“Do you think that a married woman should know no man but her husband?”

“What did she marry a husband for?”

“Really, Joanna ... however, there’s no use arguing with you. I’m sorry you’re annoyed at the gossip, but to keep out of the gossip here one would have to live like a cabbage. You haven’t exactly kept out of it yourself.”

“Have done, do, with telling me that. They only talk about me because I’m more go-ahead than any of ’em, and make more money. Anyone may talk about you that way and I shan’t mind. But to have it said at the Woolpack as you, a married woman, lets a man like Sir Harry be for ever hanging around your house ...”

“Are you jealous?” said Ellen softly. “Poor old Jo I’m sorry if I’ve taken another of your men.”

Joanna opened her mouth and stared at her. At first she hardly understood, then, suddenly grasping what was in Ellen’s mind, she took in her breath for a torrential explanation of the whole matter. But the next minute she realized that this was hardly the moment to say anything which would prejudice her sister against Arthur Alce. If Ellen would value him more as a robbery, then let her persist in her delusion. The effort of silence was so great that Joanna became purple and apoplectic with a wild, grabbing gesture she turned away, and burst out of the house into the drive, where her trap was waiting.

Se

The next morning Mene Tekel brought fresh news from the Woolpack, and this time it was of a different quality, warranted to allay the seething of Joanna’s moral sense. Sir Harry Trevor had sold North Farthing to a retired bootmaker. He was going to the South of France for the winter, and was then coming back to his sister’s flat in London, while she went for a lecturing tour in the United States. The Woolpack was very definitely and minutely informed as to his doings, and had built its knowledge into the theory that he must have had some more money left him.

Joanna was delighted she forgave Sir Harry, and Ellen too, which was a hard matter. None the less, as November approached through the showers and floods, she felt a little anxious lest he should delay his going or perhaps even revoke it. However, the first week of the month saw the arrival of the bootmaker from Deal, with two van-loads of furniture, and his wife and four grown-up daughters all as ugly as roots, said the Woolpack. The Squire’s furniture was sold by auction at Dover, from which port his sailing was in due course guaranteed by credible eye-witnesses. Joanna once more breathed freely. No one could talk about him and Ellen now that disgraceful scandal, which seemed to lower Ellen to the level of Marsh dairy-girls in trouble, and had about it too that strange luciferian flavour of “the sins of Society,” that scandal had been killed, and its dead body taken away in the Dover mail.

Now that he was gone, and no longer a source of danger to her family’s reputation, she found herself liking Sir Harry again. He had always been friendly, and though she fundamentally disapproved of his “ways,” she was woman enough to be thrilled by his lurid reputation. Moreover, he provided a link, her last living link, with Martin’s days now that strange women kept rabbits in the backyards of North Farthing and the rooms were full of the Deal bootmaker’s resplendent suites, that time of dew and gold and dreams seemed to have faded still further off. For many years it had lain far away on the horizon, but now it seemed to have faded off the earth altogether, and to live only in the sunset sky or in the dim moon-risings, which sometimes woke her out of her sleep with a start, as if she slipped on the verge of some troubling memory.

This kindlier state of affairs lasted for about a month, during which Joanna saw very little of Ellen. She was at rest about her sister, for the fact that Ellen might be feeling lonely and unhappy at the departure of her friend did not trouble her in the least; such emotions, so vile in their source, could not call for any sympathy. Besides, she was busy, hunting for a new cowman to work under Broadhurst, whose undertakings, since the establishment of the milk-round, had almost come to equal those of the looker in activity and importance.

She was just about to set out one morning for a farm near Brenzett, when she saw Arthur Alce come up to the door on horseback.

“Hullo, Jo!” he called rather anxiously through the window. “Have you got Ellen?”

“I? No. Why should I have her, pray?”

“Because I ain’t got her.”

“What d’you mean? Get down, Arthur, and come and talk to me in here. Don’t let everyone hear you shouting like that.”

Arthur hitched his horse to the paling and came in.

“I thought maybe I’d find her here,” he said. “I ain’t seen her since breakfast.”

“There’s other places she could have gone besides here. Maybe she’s gone shopping in Romney and forgot to tell you.”

“It’s queer her starting off like that without a word and she’s took her liddle bag and a few bits of things with her too.”

“What things? Arthur! Why couldn’t you tell me that before?”

“I was going to.... I’m feeling a bit anxious, Jo.... I’ve a feeling she’s gone after that Old Squire.”

“You dare say such a thing! Arthur, I’m ashamed of you, believing such a thing of your wife and my sister.”

“Well, she was unaccountable set on him.”

“Nonsense! He just amused her. It’s you whose wife she is.”

“She’s scarce given me a word more’n in the way of business, as you might say, this last three month. And she won’t let me touch her.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I didn’t want to trouble you, and I thought maybe it was a private matter.”

“You should have told me the drackly minute Ellen started not to treat you proper. I’d have spoken to her.... Now we’re in for a valiant terrification.”

“I’m unaccountable sorry, Jo.”

“How long has she been gone?”

“Since around nine. I went out to see the tegs, counting them up to go inland, and when I came in for dinner the gal told me as Ellen had gone out soon after breakfast, and had told her to see as I got my dinner, as she wouldn’t be back.”

“Why didn’t you start after her at once?”

“Well, I made sure as she’d gone to you. Then I began to think over things and put ’em together, and I found she’d taken her liddle bag, and I got scared. I never liked her seeing such a lot of that man.”

“Then why didn’t you stop it?”

“How could I?”

“I could have and the way people talked.... I’d have locked her up sooner than ... well, it’s too late now ... the boat went at twelve. Oh, Arthur, why didn’t you watch her properly? Why did you let her go like that? Think of it! What’s to become of her away in foreign parts with a man who ain’t her husband ... my liddle Ellen ... oh, it’s turble turble ”

Her speech suddenly roughened into the Doric of the Marsh, and she sat down heavily, dropping her head to her knees.

“Joanna don’t, don’t ... don’t take on, Jo.”

He had not seen her cry before, and now she frightened him. Her shoulders heaved, and great panting sobs shook her broad back.

“My liddle Ellen ... my treasure, my duckie ... oh, why have you left us?... You could have come back to me if you didn’t like it.... Oh, Ellen, where are you?... Come back ...”

Arthur stood motionless beside her, his frame rigid, his protuberant blue eyes staring through the window at the horizon. He longed to take Joanna in his arms, caress and comfort her, but he knew that he must not.

“Cheer up,” he said at last in a husky voice, “maybe it ain’t so bad as you think. Maybe I’ll find her at home when I get back to Donkey Street.”

“Not if she took her bag. Oh, whatsumever shall we do? whatsumever shall we do?”

“We can but wait. If she don’t come back, maybe she’ll send me a letter.”

“It queers me how you can speak so light of it.”

“I speak light?”

“Yes, you don’t seem to tumble to it.”

“Reckon I do tumble to it, but what can we do?”

“You shouldn’t have left her alone all that time from breakfast till dinner if you’d gone after her at the start you could have brought her back. You should ought to have kicked Sir Harry out of Donkey Street before the start. I’d have done it surely. Reckon I love Ellen more’n you.”

“Reckon you do, Jo. I tell you, I ought never to have married her since it was you I cared for all along.”

“Hold your tongue, Arthur. I’m ashamed of you to choose this time to say such an immoral thing.”

“It ain’t immoral it’s the truth.”

“Well, it shouldn’t ought to be the truth. When you married Ellen you’d no business to go on caring for me. I guess all this is a judgment on you, caring for a woman when you’d married her sister.”

“You ain’t yourself, Jo,” said Arthur sadly, “and there’s no sense arguing with you. I’ll go away till you’ve got over it. Maybe I’ll have some news for you to-morrow morning.”

Se

To-morrow morning he had a letter from Ellen herself. He brought it at once to a strangely drooping and weary-eyed Joanna, and read it again over her shoulder.

“DEAR ARTHUR,” it ran

“I’m afraid this will hurt you and Joanna terribly, but I expect you have already guessed what has happened. I am on my way to San Remo, to join Sir Harry Trevor, and I am never coming back, because I know now that I ought not to have married you. I do not ask you to forgive me, and I’m sure Joanna won’t, but I had to think of my own happiness, and I never was a good wife to you. Believe me, I have done my best I said ‘Good-bye for ever’ to Harry a month ago, but ever since then my life has been one long misery; I cannot live without him.

“ELLEN.”

“Well, it’s only told us what we knew already,” said Joanna with a gulp, “but now we’re sure we can do better than just talk about it.”

“What can we do?”

“We can get the Old Squire’s address from somebody Mrs. Williams or the people at North Farthing House and then send a telegram after her, telling her to come back.”

“That won’t be much use.”

“It’ll be something, anyway. Maybe when she gets out there in foreign parts she won’t be so pleased or maybe he never asked her to come, and he’ll have changed his mind about her. We must try and get her back. Where have you told your folk she’s gone to?”

“I’ve told ’em she’s gone to stop with you.”

“Well, I can’t pretend she’s here. You might have thought of something better, Arthur.”

“I can’t think of nothing else.”

“You just about try. If only we can get her somewheres for a week, so as to have time to write and tell her as all will be forgiven and you’ll take her back....”

Arthur looked mutinous.

“I don’t know as I want her back.”

“Arthur, you must. Otherways, everybody ull have to know what’s happened.”

“But she didn’t like being with me, or she wouldn’t have gone away.”

“She liked it well enough, or she wouldn’t have stayed with you two year. Arthur, you must have her back, you just about must. You send her a telegram saying as you’ll have her back if only she’ll come this once, before folks find out where she’s gone.”

Arthur’s resistance gradually failed before Joanna’s entreaties and persuasions. He could not withstand Jo when her blue eyes were all dull with tears, and her voice was hoarse and frantic. For some months now his marriage had seemed to him a wrong and immoral thing, but he rather sorrowfully told himself that having made the first false step he could not now turn round and come back, even if Ellen herself had broken away. He rode off to find out the Squire’s address, and send his wife the summoning and forgiving telegram.

Se

It was not perhaps surprising that, in spite of a lavish and exceedingly expensive offer of forgiveness, Ellen did not come home. Over a week passed without even an acknowledgment of the telegram, which she must have found reproachfully awaiting her arrival the symbol of Walland Marsh pursuing her into the remoteness of a new life and a strange country.

As might have been expected Joanna felt this period of waiting and inactivity far more than she had felt the actual shock. She had all the weight on her shoulders of a sustained deception. She and Arthur had to dress up a story to deceive the neighbourhood, and they gave out that Ellen was in London, staying with Mrs. Williams her husband had forbidden her to go, so she had run away, and now there would have to be some give and take on both sides before she could come back. Joanna had been inspired to circulate this legend by the discovery that Ellen actually had taken a ticket for London. She had probably guessed the sensation that her taking a ticket to Dover would arouse at the local station, so had gone first to London and travelled down by the boat express. It was all very cunning, and Joanna thought she saw the Old Squire’s experienced hand in it. Of course it might be true that he had not persuaded Ellen to come out to him, but that she had gone to him on a sudden impulse.... But even Joanna’s plunging instinct realized that her sister was not the sort to take desperate risks for love’s sake, and the whole thing had about it a sly, concerted air, which made her think that Sir Harry was not only privy, but a prime mover.

After some ten days of anxiety, self-consciousness, shame and exasperation, these suspicions were confirmed by a letter from the Squire himself. He wrote from Oepedaletti, a small place near San Remo, and he wrote charmingly. No other adverb could qualify the peculiarly suave, tactful, humorous and gracious style in which not only he flung a mantle of romance over his and Ellen’s behaviour (which till then, judged by the standards of Ansdore, had been just drably “wicked"), but by some mysterious means brought in Joanna as a third conspirator, linked by a broad and kindly intuition with himself and Ellen against a censorious world.

“You, who know Ellen so well, will realize that she has never till now had her birthright. You did your best for her, but both of you were bounded north, south, east and west by Walland Marsh. I wish you could see her now, beside me on the terrace she is like a little finch in the sunshine of its first spring day. Her only trouble is her fear of you, her fear that you will not understand. But I tell her I would trust you first of all the world to do that. As a woman of the world, you must realize exactly what public opinion is worth if you yourself had bowed down to it, where would you be now? Ellen is only doing now what you did for yourself eleven years ago.”

Joanna’s feelings were divided between gratification at the flattery she never could resist, and a fierce resentment at the insult offered her in supposing she could ever wink at such “goings on.” The more indignant emotions predominated in the letter she wrote Sir Harry, for she knew well enough that the flattery was not sincere he was merely out to propitiate.

Her feelings towards Ellen were exceedingly bitter, and the letter she wrote her was a rough one:

“You’re nothing but a baggage. It makes no difference that you wear fine clothes and shoes that he’s bought you to your shame. You’re just every bit as low as Martha Tilden whom I got shut of ten year ago for no worse than you’ve done.”

Nevertheless, she insisted that Ellen should come home. She guaranteed Arthur’s forgiveness, and somewhat rashly the neighbours’ discretion. “I’ve told them you’re in London with Mrs. Williams. But that won’t hold good much more than another week. So be quick and come home, before it’s too late.”

Unfortunately the facts of Ellen’s absence were already beginning to leak out. People did not believe in the London story. Had not the Old Squire’s visits to Donkey Street been the tattle of the Marsh for six months? She was condemned not only at the Woolpack, but at the three markets of Rye, Lydd and Romney. Joanna was furious.

“It’s that Post Office,” she exclaimed, and the remark was not quite unjust. The contents of telegrams had always had an alarming way of spreading themselves over the district, and Joanna felt sure that Miss Godfrey would have both made and published her own conclusions on the large amount of foreign correspondence now received at Ansdore.

Ellen herself was the next to write. She wrote impenitently and decidedly. She would never come back, so there was no good either Joanna or Arthur expecting it. She had left Donkey Street because she could not endure its cramped ways any longer, and it was unreasonable to expect her to return.

“If Arthur has any feeling for me left, he will divorce me. He can easily do it, and then we shall both be free to re-marry.”

“Reckon she thinks the old Squire ud like to marry her,” said Alce, “I’d be glad if I thought so well of him.”

“He can’t marry her, seeing as she’s your wife.”

“If we were divorced, she wouldn’t be.”

“She would. You were made man and wife in Pedlinge church, as I saw with my own eyes, and I’ll never believe as what was done then can be undone just by having some stuff written in the papers.”

“It’s a lawyer’s business,” said Arthur.

“I can’t see that,” said Joanna “a parson married you, so reckon a parson must unmarry you.”

“He wouldn’t do it. It’s a lawyer’s job.”

“I’d thank my looker if he went about undoing my carter’s work. Those lawyers want to put their heads in everywhere. And as for Ellen, all I can say is, it’s just like her wanting the Ten Commandments altered to suit her convenience. Reckon they ain’t refined and high-class enough for her. But she may ask for a divorce till she’s black in the face she shan’t get it.”

So Ellen had to remain very much against the grain, for she was fundamentally respectable a breaker of the law. She wrote once or twice more on the subject, appealing to Arthur, since Joanna’s reply had shown her exactly how much quarter she could expect. But Arthur was not to be won, for apart from Joanna’s domination, and his own unsophisticated beliefs in the permanence of marriage, his suspicions were roused by the Old Squire’s silence on the matter. At no point did he join his appeals and arguments with Ellen’s, though he had been ready enough to write to excuse and explain.... No, Arthur felt that love and wisdom lay not in sanctifying Ellen in her new ways with the blessing of the law, but in leaving the old open for her to come back to when the new should perhaps grow hard. “That chap ’ull get shut of her I don’t trust him and then she’ll want to come back to me or Jo.”

So he wrote with boring reiteration of his willingness to receive her home again as soon as she chose to return, and assured her that he and Joanna had still managed to keep the secret of her departure, so that she need not fear scornful tongues. They had given the Marsh to understand that no settlement having been arrived at, Ellen had accompanied Mrs. Williams to the South of France, hoping that things would have improved on her return. This would account for the foreign post-marks, and both he and Joanna were more proud of their cunning than was quite warrantable from its results.

Se

That winter brought Great Ansdore at last into the market. It would have come in before had not Joanna so rashly bragged of her intention to buy it. As it was “I guess I’ll get a bit more out of the old gal by holding on,” said Prickett disrespectfully, and he held on till Joanna’s impatience about equalled his extremity; whereupon he sold it to her for not over fifty per cent, more than he would have asked had he not known of her ambition. She paid the price manfully, and Prickett went out with his few sticks.

The Woolpack was inclined to be contemptuous.

“Five thousand pounds for Prickett’s old shacks, and his mouldy pastures that are all burdock and fluke. If Joanna Godden had had any know, she could have beaten him down fifteen hundred he was bound to sell, and she was a fool not to make him sell at her price.”

But when Joanna wanted a thing she did not mind paying for it, and she had wanted Great Ansdore very much, though no one knew better than she that it was shacky and mouldy. For long it had mocked with its proud title the triumphs of Little Ansdore. Now the whole manor of Ansdore was hers, Great and Little, and with it she held the living of Brodnyx and Pedlinge it was she, of her own might, who would appoint the next Rector, and for some time she imagined that she had it in her power to turn out Mr. Pratt.

She at once set to work, putting her new domain in order. Some of the pasture she grubbed up for spring sowings, the rest she drained by cutting a new channel from the Kent Ditch to the White Kemp Sewer. She re-roofed the barns with slate, and painted and re-tiled the dwelling-house. This last she decided to let to some family of gentlepeople, while herself keeping on the farm and the barns. The dwelling-house of Little Ansdore, though more flat and spreading, was in every way superior to that of Great Ansdore, which was rather new and inclined to gimcrackiness, having been built on the site of the first dwelling, burnt down somewhere in the eighties. Besides, she loved Little Ansdore for its associations under its roof she had been born and her father had been born, under its roof she had known love and sorrow and denial and victory; she could not bear to think of leaving it. The queer, low house, with its mixture of spaciousness and crookedness, its huge, sag-ceilinged rooms and narrow, twisting passages, was almost a personality to her now, one of the Godden family, the last of kin that had remained kind.

Her activities were merciful in crowding what would otherwise have been a sorrowful period of emptiness and anxiety. It is true that Ellen’s behaviour had done much to spoil her triumph, both in the neighbourhood and in her own eyes, but she had not time to be thinking of it always. Visits to Rye, either to her lawyers or to the decorators and paper-hangers, the engaging of extra hands, both temporary and permanent, for the extra work, the supervising of labourers and workmen whom she never could trust to do their job without her ... all these crowded her cares into a few hours of evening or an occasionally wakeful night.

But every now and then she must suffer. Sometimes she would be overwhelmed, in the midst of all her triumphant business, with a sense of personal failure. She had succeeded where most women are hopeless failures, but where so many women are successful and satisfied she had failed and gone empty. She had no home, beyond what was involved in the walls of this ancient dwelling, the womb and grave of her existence she had lost the man she loved, had been unable to settle herself comfortably with another, and now she had lost Ellen, the little sister, who had managed to hold at least a part of that over-running love, which since Martin’s death had had only broken cisterns to flow into.

The last catastrophe now loomed the largest. Joanna no longer shed tears for Martin, but she shed many for Ellen, either into her own pillow, or into the flowery quilt of the flowery room which inconsequently she held sacred to the memory of the girl who had despised it. Her grief for Ellen was mixed with anxiety and with shame. What would become of her? Joanna could not, would not, believe that she would never come back. Yet what if she came?... In Joanna’s eyes, and in the eyes of all the neighbourhood, Ellen had committed a crime which raised a barrier between her and ordinary folk. Between Ellen and her sister now stood the wall of strange, new conditions conditions that could ignore the sonorous Thou Shalt Not, which Joanna never saw apart from Mr. Pratt in his surplice and hood, standing under the Lion and the Unicorn, while all the farmers and householders of the Marsh murmured into their Prayer Books “Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.” She could not think of Ellen without this picture rising up between them, and sometimes in church she would be overwhelmed with a bitter shame, and in the lonely enclosure of her great cattle-box pew would stuff her fingers into her ears, so that she should not hear the dreadful words of her sister’s condemnation.

She had moments, too, of an even bitterer shame strange, terrible, and mercifully rare times when her attitude towards Ellen was not of judgment or of care or of longing, but of envy. Sometimes she would be overwhelmed with a sense of Ellen’s happiness in being loved, even if the love was unlawful. She had never felt this during the years that her sister had lived with Alce; the thought of his affection had brought her nothing but happiness and content. Now, on sinister occasions, she would find herself thinking of Ellen cherished and spoiled, protected and caressed, living the life of love and a desperate longing would come to her to enjoy what her sister enjoyed, to be kissed and stroked and made much of and taken care of, to see some man laying schemes and taking risks for her ... sometimes she felt that she would like to see all the fullness of her life at Ansdore, all her honour on the Three Marshes, blown to the winds if only in their stead she could have just ordinary human love, with or without the law.

Poor Joanna was overwhelmed with horror at herself sometimes she thought she must be possessed by a devil. She must be very wicked in her heart just as wicked as Ellen. What could she do to cast out this dumb, tearing spirit? should she marry one of her admirers on the Marsh, and trust to his humdrum devotion to satisfy her devouring need? Even in her despair and panic she knew that she could not do this. It was love that she must have the same sort of love that she had given Martin; that alone could bring her the joys she now envied in her sister. And love how shall it be found? Who shall go out to seek it?

Se

Towards the spring, Ellen wrote again, breaking the silence of several weeks. She wrote in a different tone some change had passed over her. She no longer asked Arthur to divorce her on the contrary she hinted her thanks for his magnanimity in not having done so. Evidently she no longer counted on marrying Sir Harry Trevor, perhaps, even, she did not wish to. But in one point she had not changed she was not coming back to her husband.

“I couldn’t bear to live that life again, especially after what’s happened. It’s not his fault it’s simply that I’m different. If he wants his freedom, I suggest that he should let me divorce him it could easily be arranged. He should go and see a really good lawyer in London.”

Yes Ellen spoke truly when she said that she was “different.” Her cavalier dealings with the situation, the glib way she spoke of divorce, the insult she flung at the respectable form of Huxtable, Vidler and Huxtable by suggesting that Arthur should consult “a really good lawyer in London,” all showed how far she had travelled from the ways of Walland Marsh.

“What’s she after now?” asked Joanna.

“Reckon they’re getting tired of each other.”

“She don’t say so.”

“No she wants to find out which way the land lays first.”

“I’ll write and tell her she can come back and live along of me, if she won’t go to you.”

“Then I’ll have to be leaving these parts I couldn’t be at Donkey Street and her at Ansdore.”

“Reckon you could she can go out of the way when you call.”

“It wouldn’t be seemly.”

“Where ud you go?”

“I’ve no notion. But reckon all this ain’t the question yet. Ellen won’t come back to you no more than she’ll come back to me.”

“She’ll just about have to come if she gets shut of the Old Squire, seeing as she’s got no more than twelve pounds a year of her own. Reckon poor father was a wise man when he left Ansdore to me and not to both of us you’d almost think he’d guessed what she was coming to.”

Joanna wrote to Ellen and made her offer. Her sister wrote back at great length, and rather pathetically “Harry” was going on to Venice, and she did not think she would go with him “when one gets to know a person, Jo, one sometimes finds they are not quite what one thought them.” She would like to be by herself for a bit, but she did not want to come back to Ansdore, even if Arthur went away “it would be very awkward after what has happened.” She begged Jo to be generous and make her some small allowance “Harry would provide for me if he hadn’t had such terrible bad luck he never was very well off, you know, and he can’t manage unless we keep together. I know you wouldn’t like me to be tied to him just by money considerations.”

Joanna was bewildered by the letter. She could have understood Ellen turning in horror and loathing from the partner of her guilt, but she could not understand this wary and matter-of-fact separation. What was her sister made of? “Harry would provide for me” ... would she really have accepted such a provision? Joanna’s ears grew red. “I’ll make her come home,” she exclaimed savagely “she’ll have to come if she’s got no money.”

“Maybe she’ll stop along of him,” said Arthur.

“Then let her I don’t care. But she shan’t have my money to live on by herself in foreign parts, taking up with any man that comes her way; for I don’t trust her now I reckon she’s lost to shame.”

She wrote Ellen to this effect, and, not surprisingly, received no answer. She felt hard and desperate the thought that she was perhaps binding her sister to her misdoing gave her only occasional spasms of remorse. Sometimes she would feel as if all her being and all her history, Ansdore and her father’s memory, disowned her sister, and that she could never take her back into her life again, however penitent “She’s mocked at our good ways she’s loose, she’s low.” At other times her heart melted towards Ellen in weakness, and she knew within herself that no matter what she did, she would always be her little sister, her child, her darling, whom all her life she had cherished and could never cast out.

She said nothing about these swaying feelings to Arthur she had of late grown far more secretive about herself as for him, he took things as they came. He found a wondrous quiet in this time, when he was allowed to serve Joanna as in days of old. He did not think of marrying her he knew that even if it was true that the lawyers could set aside parson’s word, Joanna would not take him now, any more than she would have taken him five or ten or fifteen years ago; she did not think about him in that way. On the other hand she appreciated his company and his services. He called at Ansdore two or three times a week, and ran her errands for her. It was almost like old times, and in his heart he knew and was ashamed to know that he hoped Ellen would never come back. If she came back either to him or to Joanna, these days of quiet happiness would end. Meantime, he would not think of it he was Joanna’s servant, and when she could not be in two places at once it was his joy and privilege to be in one of them. “I could live like this for ever, surely,” he said to himself, as he sat stirring his solitary cup of tea at Donkey Street, knowing that he was to call at Ansdore the next morning. That was the morning he met Joanna in the drive, hatless, and holding a piece of paper in her hand.

“I’ve heard from Ellen she’s telegraphed from Venice she’s coming home.”

Se

Now that she knew Ellen was coming, Joanna had nothing in her heart but joy and angry love. Ellen was coming back, at last, after many wanderings and she saw now that these wanderings included the years of her life with Alce she was coming back to Ansdore and the old home. Joanna forgot how much she had hated it, would not think that this precious return was merely the action of a woman without resources. She gave herself up to the joy of preparing a welcome as splendidly and elaborately as she had prepared for her sister’s return from school. This time, however, she went further, and actually made some concessions to Ellen’s taste. She remembered that she liked dull die-away colours “like the mould on jam,” so she took down the pink curtains and folded away the pink bedspread, and put in their places material that the shop at Rye assured her was “art green” which, in combination with the crimson, flowery walls and floor contrived most effectually to suggest a scum of grey-green mould on a pot of especially vivid strawberry jam.

But she was angry too her heart burned to think not only of Ellen’s sin but of the casual way in which she treated it. “I won’t have none of her loose notions here,” said Joanna grimly. She made up her mind to give her sister a good talking to, to convince her of the way in which her “goings on” struck decent folk; but she would not do it at the start “I’ll give her time to settle down a bit first.”

During the few days which elapsed between Ellen’s telegram and her arrival, Joanna saw nothing of Alce. She had one letter from him, in which he told her that he had been over to Fairfield to look at the plough she was speaking of, but that it was old stuff and would be no use to her. He did not even mention Ellen’s name. She wondered if he was making any plans for leaving Donkey Street she hoped he would not be such a fool as to go. He and Ellen could easily keep out of each other’s way. Still, if Ellen wouldn’t stay unless he went, she would rather have Ellen than Alce.... He would have to sell Donkey Street, or perhaps he might let it off for a little time.

April had just become May when Ellen returned to Ansdore. It had been a rainy spring, and great pools were on the marshes, overflows from the dykes and channels, clear mirrors green from the grass beneath their shallows and the green rainy skies that hung above them. Here and there they reflected white clumps and walls of hawthorn, with the pale yellowish gleam of the buttercups in the pastures. The two sisters, driving back from Rye, looked round on the green twilight of the Marsh with indifferent eyes. Joanna had ceased to look for any beauty in her surroundings since Martin’s days the small gift of sight that he had given her had gone out with the light of his own eyes, and this evening all she saw was the flooded pastures, which meant poor grazing for her tegs due to come down from the Coast, and her lambs new-born on the Kent Innings. As for Ellen, the Marsh had always stood with her for unrelieved boredom. Its eternal flatness the monotony of its roads winding through an unvarying landscape of reeds and dykes and grazings, past farms each of which was almost exactly like the one before it, with red walls and orange roofs and a bush of elms and oaks the wearisome repetition of its seasons the mists and floods of winter, the may and buttercups of spring, the hay and meadow-sweet and wild carrot of the summer months, the bleakness and winds of autumn all this was typical of her life there, water-bound, cut off from all her heart’s desire of variety and beauty and elegance, of the life to which she must now return because her attempt to live another had failed and left her stranded on a slag-heap of disillusion from which even Ansdore was a refuge.

Ellen sat very trim and erect beside Joanna in the trap. She wore a neat grey coat and skirt, obviously not of local, nor indeed of English, make, and a little toque of flowers. She had taken Joanna’s breath away on Rye platform; it had been very much like old times when she came home for the holidays and checked the impulse of her sister’s love by a baffling quality of self-containment. Joanna, basing her expectations on the Bible story of the Prodigal Son rather than on the experiences of the past winter, had looked for a subdued penitent, surfeited with husks, who, if not actually casting herself at her sister’s feet and offering herself as her servant, would at least have a hang-dog air and express her gratitude for so much forgiveness. Instead of which Ellen had said “Hullo, Jo it’s good to see you again,” and offered her a cool, delicately powdered cheek, which Joanna’s warm lips had kissed with a queer, sad sense of repulse and humiliation. Before they had been together long, it was she who wore the hang-dog air for some unconscionable reason she felt in the wrong, and found herself asking her sister polite, nervous questions about the journey.

This attitude prevailed throughout the evening on the drive home, and at the excellent supper they sat down to: a stuffed capon and a bottle of wine, truly a genteel feast of reconciliation but Joanna had grown more aristocratic in her feeding since she bought Great Ansdore. Ellen spoke about her journey she had had a smooth crossing, but had felt rather ill in the train. It was a long way from Venice yes, you came through France, and Switzerland too ... the St. Gothard tunnel ... twenty minutes well, I never?... Yes, a bit smoky you had to keep the windows shut ... she preferred French to Italian cooking she did not like all that oil ... oh yes, foreigners were very polite when they knew you, but not to strangers ... just the opposite from England, where people were polite to strangers and rude to their friends. Joanna had never spoken or heard so many generalities in her life.

At the end of supper she felt quite tired, what with saying one thing with her tongue and another in her heart. Sometimes she felt that she must say something to break down this unreality, which was between them like a wall of ice at other times she felt angry, and it was Ellen she wanted to break down, to force out of her superior refuge, and show up to her own self as just a common sinner receiving common forgiveness. But there was something about Ellen which made this impossible something about her manner, with its cold poise, something about her face, which had indefinitely changed it looked paler, wider, and there were secrets at the corners of her mouth.

This was not the first time that Joanna had seen her sister calm and collected while she herself was flustered but this evening a sense of her own awkwardness helped to put her at a still greater disadvantage. She found herself making inane remarks, hesitating and stuttering she grew sulky and silent, and at last suggested that Ellen would like to go to bed.

Her sister seemed glad enough, and they went upstairs together. But even the sight of her old bedroom, where the last year of her maidenhood had been spent, even the sight of the new curtains chastening its exuberance with their dim austerity, did not dissolve Ellen’s terrible, cold sparkle her frozen fire.

“Good night,” said Joanna.

“Good night,” said Ellen, “may I have some hot water?”

“I’ll tell the gal,” said Joanna tamely, and went out.

Se

When she was alone in her own room, she seemed to come to herself. She felt ashamed of having been so baffled by Ellen, of having received her on those terms. She could not bear to think of Ellen living on in the house, so terribly at an advantage. If she let things stay as they were, she was tacitly acknowledging some indefinite superiority which her sister had won through sin. All the time she was saying nothing she felt that Ellen was saying in her heart “I have been away to foreign parts, I have been loved by a man I don’t belong to, I have Seen Life, I have stopped at hotels, I have met people of a kind you haven’t even spoken to....” That was what Ellen was saying, instead of what Joanna thought she ought to say, which was “I’m no better then a dairy girl in trouble, than Martha Tilden whom you sacked when I was a youngster, and it’s unaccountable good of you to have me home.”

Joanna was not the kind to waste her emotions in the sphere of thought. She burst out of the room, and nearly knocked over Mene Tekel, who was on her way to Ellen with a jug of hot water.

“Give that to me,” she said, and went to her sister’s door, at which she was still sufficiently demoralized to knock.

“Come in,” said Ellen.

“I’ve brought you your hot water.”

“Thank you very much I hope it hasn’t been a trouble.”

Ellen was standing by the bed in a pretty lilac silk wrapper, her hair tucked away under a little lace cap. Joanna wore her dressing-gown of turkey-red flannel, and her hair hung down her back in two great rough plaits. For a moment she stared disapprovingly at her sister, whom she thought looked “French,” then she suddenly felt ashamed of herself and her ugly, shapeless coverings. This made her angry, and she burst out

“Ellen Alce, I want a word with you.”

“Sit down, Jo,” said Ellen sweetly.

Joanna flounced on to the rosy, slippery chintz of Ellen’s sofa. Ellen sat down on the bed.

“What do you want to say to me?”

“An unaccountable lot of things.”

“Must they all be said to-night? I’m very sleepy.”

“Well, you must just about keep awake. I can’t let it stay over any longer. Here you’ve been back five hour, and not a word passed between us.”

“On the contrary, we have had some intelligent conversation for the first time in our lives.”

“You call that rot about furriners ‘intelligent conversation’? Well, all I can say is that it’s like you all pretence. One ud think you’d just come back from a pleasure-trip abroad instead of from a wicked life that you should ought to be ashamed of.”

For the first time a flush darkened the heavy whiteness of Ellen’s skin.

“So you want to rake up the past? It’s exactly like you, Jo ’having things out,’ I suppose you’d call it. How many times in our lives have you and I ’had things out’? And what good has it ever done us?”

“I can’t go on all pretending like this I can’t go on pretending I think you an honest woman when I don’t I can’t go on saying ’It’s a fine day’ when I’m wondering how you’ll fare in the Day of Judgment.”

“Poor old Jo,” said Ellen, “you’d have had an easier life if you hadn’t lived, as they say, so close to nature. It’s just what you call pretences and others call good manners that make life bearable for some people.”

“Yes, for ‘some people’ I daresay people whose characters won’t stand any straight talking.”

“Straight talking is always so rude no one ever seems to require it on pleasant occasions.”

“That’s all nonsense. You always was a squeamish, obstropulous little thing, Ellen. It’s only natural that having you back in my house as I’m more than glad to do I should want to know how you stand. What made you come to me sudden like that?”

“Can’t you guess? It’s rather unpleasant for me to have to tell you.”

“Reckon it was that man” somehow Sir Harry’s name had become vaguely improper, Joanna felt unable to pronounce it “then you’ve made up your mind not to marry him,” she finished.

“How can I marry him, seeing I’m somebody else’s wife?”

“I’m glad to hear you say such a proper thing. It ain’t what you was saying at the start. Then you wanted a divorce and all sorts of foreign notions ... what’s made you change round?”

“Well, Arthur wouldn’t give me a divorce, for one thing. For another, as I told you in my letter, one often doesn’t know people till one’s lived with them besides, he’s too old for me.”

“He’ll never see sixty again.”

“He will,” said Ellen indignantly “he was only fifty-five in March.”

“That’s thirty year more’n you.”

“I’ve told you he’s too old for me.”

“You might have found out that at the start he was only six months younger then.”

“There’s a great many things I might have done at the start,” said Ellen bitterly “but I tell you, Joanna, life isn’t quite the simple thing you imagine. There was I, married to a man utterly uncongenial ”

“He wasn’t! You’re not to miscall Arthur he’s the best man alive.”

“I don’t deny it perhaps that is why I found him uncongenial. Anyhow, we were quite unsuited to each other we hadn’t an idea in common.”

“You liked him well enough when you married him.”

“I’ve told you before that it’s difficult to know anyone thoroughly till one’s lived with them.”

“Then at that rate, who’s to get married eh?”

“I don’t know,” said Ellen wearily, “all I know is that I’ve made two bad mistakes over two different men, and I think the least you can do is to let me forget it as far as I’m able and not come here baiting me when I’m dog tired, and absolutely down and out....”

She bowed her face into her hands, and burst into tears. Joanna flung her arms round her

“Oh, don’t you cry, duckie don’t I didn’t mean to bait you. Only I was getting so mortal vexed at you and me walking round each other like two cats and never getting a straight word.”

“Jo,” ... said Ellen.

Her face was hidden in her sister’s shoulder, and her whole body had drooped against Joanna’s side, utterly weary after three days of travel and disillusioned loneliness.

“Reckon I’m glad you’ve come back, dearie and I won’t ask you any more questions. I’m a cross-grained, cantankerous old thing, but you’ll stop along of me a bit, won’t you?”

“Yes,” said Ellen, “you’re all I’ve got in the world.”

“Arthur ud take you back any day you ask it,” said Joanna, thinking this a good time for mediation.

“No no!” cried Ellen, beginning to cry again “I won’t stay if you try to make me go back to Arthur. If he had the slightest feeling for me he would let me divorce him.”

“How could you? seeing that he’s been a pattern all his life.”

“He needn’t do anything wrong he need only pretend to. The lawyers ud fix it up.”

Ellen was getting French again. Joanna pushed her off her shoulder.

“Really, Ellen Alce, I’m ashamed of you that you should speak such words! What upsets me most is that you don’t seem to see how wrong you’ve done. Don’t you never read your Bible any more?”

“No,” sobbed Ellen.

“Well, there’s lots in the Bible about people like you you’re called by your right name there, and it ain’t a pretty one. Some are spoken uncommon hard of, and some were forgiven because they loved much. Seemingly you haven’t loved much, so I don’t see how you expect to be forgiven. And there’s lots in the Prayer Book too ... the Bible and the Prayer Book both say you’ve done wrong, and you don’t seem to mind all you think of is how you can get out of your trouble. Reckon you’re like a child that’s done wrong and thinks of nothing but coaxing round so as not to be punished.”

“I have been punished.”

“Not half what you deserve.”

“It’s all very well for you to say that you don’t understand; and what’s more, you never will. You’re a hard woman, Jo because you’ve never had the temptations that ordinary women have to fight against.”

“How dare you say that? Temptation! Reckon I know ...” A sudden memory of those painful and humiliating moments when she had fought with those strange powers and discontents, made Joanna turn hot with shame. The realization that she had come very close to Ellen’s sin in her heart did not make her more relenting towards the sinner on the contrary, she hardened.

“Anyways, I’ve said enough to you for to-night.”

“I hope you don’t mean to say more to-morrow.”

“No I don’t know that I do. Reckon you’re right, and we don’t get any good from ‘having things out.’ Seemingly we speak with different tongues, and think with different hearts.”

She stood up, and her huge shadow sped over the ceiling, hanging over Ellen as she crouched on the bed. Then she stalked out of the room, almost majestic in her turkey-red dressing-gown.

Se

Ellen kept very close to the house during the next few days. Her face wore a demure, sullen expression towards Joanna she was quiet and sweet, and evidently anxious that there should be no further opening of hearts between them. She was very polite to the maids she won their good opinion by making her bed herself, so that they should not have any extra work on her account.

Perhaps it was this domestic good opinion which was at the bottom of the milder turn which the gossip about her took at this time. Naturally tongues had been busy ever since it became known that Joanna was expecting her back Sir Harry Trevor had got shut of her for the baggage she was ... she had got shut of Sir Harry Trevor for the blackguard he was ... she had travelled back as somebody’s maid, to pay her fare ... she had brought her own French maid as far as Calais ... she had walked from Dover ... she had brought four trunks full of French clothes. These conflicting rumours must have killed each other, for a few days after her return the Woolpack was saying that after all there might be something in Joanna’s tale of a trip with Mrs. Williams of course everyone knew that both Ellen and the Old Squire had been at San Remo, but now it was suddenly discovered that Mrs. Williams had been there too anyway, there was no knowing that she hadn’t, and Ellen Alce didn’t look the sort that ud go to a furrin place alone with a man. Mrs. Vine had seen her through the parlour window, and her face was as white as chalk not a scrap of paint on it. Mr. Southland had met her on the Brodnyx Road, and she had bowed to him polite and stately no shrinking from an honest man’s eye. According to the Woolpack, if you sinned as Ellen was reported to have sinned, you were either brazen or thoroughly ashamed of yourself, and Ellen, by being neither, did much to soften public opinion, and make it incline towards the official explanation of her absence.

This tendency increased when it became known that Arthur Alce was leaving Donkey Street. The Woolpack held that if Ellen had been guilty, Alce would not put himself in the wrong by going away. He would either have remained as the visible rebuke of her misconduct, or he would have bundled Ellen herself off to some distant part of the kingdom, such as the Isle of Wight, where the Goddens had cousins. By leaving the neighbourhood he gave colour to the mysteriously-started rumour that he was not so easy to get on with as you’d think ... after all, it’s never a safe thing for a girl to marry her sister’s sweetheart ... probably Alce had been hankering after his old love and Ellen resented it ... the Woolpack suddenly discovered that Alce was leaving not so much on Ellen’s account as on Joanna’s he’d been unable to get off with the old love, even when he’d got on with the new, and now that the new was off too ... well, there was nothing for it but for Arthur Alce to be off. He was going to his brother, who had a big farm in the shires a proper farm, with great fields each of which was nearly as big as a marsh farm, fifty, seventy, a hundred acres even.

Se

Joanna bitterly resented Arthur’s going, but she could not prevent it, for if he stayed Ellen threatened to go herself.

“I’ll get a post as lady’s-maid sooner than stay on here with you and Arthur. Have you absolutely no delicacy, Jo? Can’t you see how awkward it’ll be for me if everywhere I go I run the risk of meeting him? Besides, you’ll be always plaguing me to go back to him, and I tell you I’ll never do that never.”

Arthur, too, did not seem anxious to stay. He saw that if Ellen was at Ansdore he could not be continually running to and fro on his errands for Joanna. That tranquil life of service was gone, and he did not care for the thought of exile at Donkey Street, a shutting of himself into his parish of Old Romney, with the Kent Ditch between him and Joanna like a prison wall.

When Joanna told him what Ellen had said, he accepted it meekly

“That’s right, Joanna I must go.”

“But that ull be terrible hard for you, Arthur.”

He looked at her.

“Reckon it will.”

“Where ull you go?”

“Oh, I can go to Tom’s.”

“That’s right away in the shires, ain’t it?”

“Yes beyond Leicester.”

“Where they do the hunting.”

“Surelye.”

“What’s the farm?”

“Grain mostly and he’s done well with his sheep. He’d be glad to have me for a bit.”

“What’ll you do with Donkey Street?”

“Let it off for a bit.”

“Don’t you sell!”

“Not I!”

“You’ll be meaning to come back?”

“I’ll be hoping.”

Joanna gazed at him for a few moments in silence, and a change came into her voice

“Arthur, you’re doing all this because of me.”

“I’m doing it for you, Joanna.”

“Well I don’t feel I’ve any call I haven’t any right.... I mean, if Ellen don’t like you here, she must go herself ... it ain’t fair on you you at Donkey Street for more’n twenty year ...”

“Don’t you trouble about that. A change won’t hurt me. Reckon either Ellen or me ull have to go and it ud break your heart if it was Ellen.”

“Why can’t you both stay? Ellen ull have to stay if I make her. I don’t believe a word of what she says about going as lady’s maid she hasn’t got the grit nor the character neither, though she doesn’t seem to think of that.”

“It ud be unaccountable awkward, Jo and it ud set Ellen against both of us, and bring you trouble. Maybe if I go she’ll take a different view of things. I shan’t let off the place for longer than three year ... it’ll give her a chance to think different, and then maybe we can fix up something....”

Joanna fastened on to these words, both for her own comfort in Arthur’s loss, and for the quieting of her conscience, which told her that it was preposterous that he should leave Donkey Street so that she could keep Ellen at Ansdore. Of course, if she did her duty she would pack Ellen off to the Isle of Wight, so that Arthur could stay. The fact was, however, that she wanted the guilty, ungracious Ellen more than she wanted the upright, devoted Arthur she was glad to know of any terms on which her sister would consent to remain under her roof it seemed almost too good to be true, to think that once more she had the little sister home....

So she signed the warrant for Arthur’s exile, which was to do so much to spread the more favourable opinion of Ellen Alce that had mysteriously crept into being since her return. He let off Donkey Street on a three years’ lease to young Jim Honisett, the greengrocer’s son at Rye, who had recently married and whose wish to set up as farmer would naturally be to the advantage of his father’s shop. He let his furniture with it too.... He himself would take nothing to his brother, who kept house in a very big way, the same as he farmed.... “Reckon I should ought to learn a thing or two about grain-growing that’ll be useful to me when I come back,” said Arthur stoutly.

He had come to say good-bye to Joanna on a June evening just before the quarter day. The hot scents of hay-making came in through the open parlour window, and they were free, for Ellen had gone with Mr. and Mrs. Southland to Rye for the afternoon of late she had accepted one or two small invitations from the neighbours. Joanna poured Arthur out a cup of tea from the silver teapot he had given her as a wedding present six years ago.

“Well, Arthur reckon it’ll be a long time before you and me have tea again together.”

“Reckon it will.”

“Howsumever, I shall always think of you when I pour it out of your teapot which will be every day that I don’t have it in the kitchen.”

“Thank you, Jo.”

“And you’ll write and tell me how you’re getting on?”

“Reckon I will.”

“Maybe you’ll send me some samples of those oats your brother did so well with. I’m not over pleased with that Barbacklaw, and ud make a change if I could find better.”

“I’ll be sure and send.”

Joanna told him of an inspiration she had had with regard to the poorer innings of Great Ansdore she was going to put down fish-guts for manure it had done wonders with some rough land over by Botolph’s Bridge “Reckon it’ll half stink the tenants out, but they’re at the beginning of a seven years lease, so they can’t help themselves much.” She held forth at great length, and Arthur listened, holding his cup and saucer carefully on his knee with his big freckled hands. His eyes were fixed on Joanna, on the strong-featured, high-coloured face he thought so much more beautiful than Ellen’s with its delicate lines and pale, petal-like skin.... Yes, Joanna was the girl all along the one for looks, the one for character give him Joanna every time, with her red and brown face, and thick brown hair, and her high, deep bosom, and sturdy, comfortable waist ... why couldn’t he have had Joanna, instead of what he’d got, which was nothing? For the first time in his life Arthur Alce came near to questioning the ways of Providence. Reckon it was the last thing he would ever do for her this going away. He wasn’t likely to come back, though he did talk of it, just to keep up their spirits. He would probably settle down in the shires go into partnership with his brother run a bigger place than Donkey Street, than Ansdore even.

“Well, I must be going now. There’s still a great lot of things to be tidied up.”

He rose, awkwardly setting down his cup. Joanna rose too. The sunset, rusty with the evening sea-mist, poured over her goodly form as she stood against the window, making its outlines dim and fiery and her hair like a burning crown.

“I shall miss you, Arthur.”

He did not speak, and she held out her hand.

“Good-bye.”

He could not say it instead he pulled her towards him by the hand he held.

“Jo I must.”

“Arthur no!”

But it was too late he had kissed her.

“That’s the first time you done it,” she said reproachfully.

“Because it’s the last. You aren’t angry, are you?”

“I? no. But, Arthur, you mustn’t forget you’re married to Ellen.”

“Am I like to forget it? And seeing all the dunnamany kisses she’s given to another man, reckon she won’t grudge me this one poor kiss I’ve given the woman I’ve loved without clasp or kiss for fifteen years.”

For the first time she heard in his voice both bitterness and passion, and at that moment the man himself seemed curiously to come alive and to compel.... But Joanna was not going to dally with temptation in the unaccustomed shape of Arthur Alce. She pushed open the door.

“Have they brought round Ranger? Hi! Peter Crouch! Yes, there he is. You’ll have a good ride home, Arthur.”

“But there’ll be rain to-morrow.”

“I don’t think it. The sky’s all red at the rims.”

“The wind’s shifted.”

Joanna moistened her finger and held it up

“So it has. But the glass is high. Reckon it’ll hold off till you’re in the shires, and then our weather won’t trouble you.”

She watched him ride off, standing in the doorway till the loops of the Brodnyx road carried him into the rusty fog that was coming from the sea.