IF there was news which Anne must send posthaste to hid him come to hear, and if Effie was neither ill nor dead, he need not overtax his wits to guess it. Yet he had never thought of this very natural sequel to the Marbeck week, and the plain fact is that he did not much want to think of it now.

“I like your Effie,” Anne told him. “I like her very well. She’s going to make a grandmother of me.”

He thought his mother had never been fatuous before: she thought he took the news morosely, and perhaps her expectation had been too high. She assumed that a child was the first consideration of a man’s life; which is not true, even, of all women and true of only a minority of men.

Nor was Sam, in fact, morose. He had never been more intensely and silently alive. In itself, this thing was right with a shining exultant rightness which warmed him to the marrow. It crowned and completed Marbeck and it crowned and completed him. He who was childless was to be a father, and by Effie! He had nothing but a thankful emotion for that, and looked with yearning eyes at Effie, giver of all else, who was now to give him this. He had not known her wonder could increase.

He saw that more was expected of him than that he should look at her adoringly. Anne was on tip-toe with anticipation. Her difficulty, if indeed she had acknowledged to herself that there was any, had been to make these visionaries see that love mattered and that Ada did not; and her success with Effie had been complete. She had never doubted of success with Sam, the weaker vessel, for there was love, sufficient in itself; and there was now the added argument of Effie’s child. She could not see that he had any choice.

He stood there conscious of the expectancy of their regard, and knew that he was failing them. He thought they took a blinkered view, seeing the child and nothing else. To them, apparently, the child came first: they were hypnotized by what was, really, an afterthought, and there was the greater need for him to keep a steadfast eye upon the truth. As he saw it, the truth was that he had put his hand to another plough; on Hartle Pike he had lighted such a candle by Effie’s grace as he trusted would never be put out; and he had gone to Ada. True, Ada had gone from him, but that was temporary and trivial, whereas here was a real distraction and he saw two loyalties before him—to Effie and the idea, and to Effie and her child. It seemed to Sam that the first was the greater of these two.

He had wrestled with an afterthought before, one which hardly yielded in temptation to that which now confronted him, and he had thrown it. He had refused to contest Sandyford because there was not room for politics in a scheme which included Ada, and still less was there room for Effie. He felt faint with discouragement at the thought that Effie, unless appearance belied her, had capitulated to her afterthought, but he stood firmly by their treaty. They had decided that duty came first; he had shouldered duty; and he, at any rate, had no room for afterthoughts.

He was loyal to Effie and the Marbeck pact, duty’s bondsman, Ada’s husband. He made a gesture of decision, which Anne misinterpreted.

“Aye,” she said a little smugly, “this settles it all right. It wasn’t common sense in you to part before, but I reckon there’ll be no parting now.”

“No,” said Effie softly, “not now.” She stole a look of shy, glad confidence at Sam, and he found it extraordinarily difficult to meet her eye, and still more difficult to say what he must, at any cost, get said.

“I’m not so sure,” he said at last, wishing the earth would swallow him.

At that moment he would cheerfully have given a hand to escape having to differ from them. They were Effie and his mother: they were his mother and Effie: the two women to whom he owed everything: more, he loved Effie so that every fibre in him yearned for her, and, even more than that, he was delicately sensitive to Effie in her present case. But it couldn’t change him. His loyalty was engaged, to fanaticism, to another Effie, high Effie of the hills, of the crusade and the idea; and this seemed to him somehow, a lower Effie, an Effie who had dipped the flag of her ideal to a coming baby, whilst he was faithful to the old unbending Effie who had thrown an imitation wedding ring away. It almost seemed as if she wanted that ring back, base metal though it was.

A case, perhaps, of splitting hairs, but, at any rate, the case of a man with a faith at one extreme and at the other his miserable conviction that happiness was not for him. He had abandoned happiness when he left Marbeck, and lived now in a place where happiness was barred by Ada.

“I’m not so sure,” he repeated drearily. “You see, there’s Ada and I have to be fair to her.”

“Ada’s left you,” snapped Anne. A contentious Sam was not going to find her amiable.

He chose to put it in another way. “My wife,” he said, “is staying at present with her father. Yes, mother,” he went on firmly, “I’m going to be fair to Ada and I’ve to guard against unfairness all the more because you won’t be fair. You won’t be ordinarily just. You always hated Ada.”

“Yes,” she agreed viciously. “I’m a clean woman. I always hated vermin.”

Sam turned to Effle immensely heartened by this virulence. “You see!” he appealed, calling to witness the hopeless bias of his mother. It was, he wished to imply, this blind hatred of Anne for Ada which accounted for his mother’s attitude, her exalting of—well—the mistress over the wife, her flagrant unmorality. He tried to put all this into his gesture. “And you,” he reinforced it, “you sent me to her, Effie.”

She bowed her head, admitting it, but Anne was not prepared to let it go at that. “Even Effie,” she said “can make a mistake. She would not send you now.”

And, looking at Effie, he saw that it was true. He had seen it from the first and it bothered him profoundly. Effie had changed: there was, in all they said, this noticeable stressing of the “now,” to differentiate them from the “then.” What was it? Anne’s arguments, or the baby, or had Effie, uninfluenced by either, really changed her mind about the Marbeck treaty? he couldn’t believe that last. Marbeck was infallible and he was dogged in the faith. He responded to the Marbeck creed like the needle of a compass to the meridian, and if with this needle also there was deflection it was corrected by his racial stubbornness. He had his people’s queer, infatuated pride in the contemplation of their own tenacity, even when, perhaps mostly when, it hurts to be tenacious.

Whereas Effie had known ever since Dubby Stewart brought her back from cloud-land that Marbeck was very fallible indeed, or, rather, Marbeck was one thing and living up to Marbeck was another. If he had said, instead of only thinking, that she was a lower Effie now, she would not have contradicted him, though she did not want a wedding ring of either metal. She wanted Sam. She was changed from the idealist who thought she could be happy as a sign-post and a spiritual guide. She had come down to Mother Earth where men and women live. At Marbeck they were on an altitude where the air was too rarefied for human lungs, and she wanted to fall with Sam from selflessness to mere humanity.

“No,” she agreed again with Anne, “I should not send you now.”

“I shall have to think this out,” he said. Effie admitted to being earthly, and he was horribly dismayed! “Effie,” he cried in pain, “don’t you see?” he wanted desperately to be understood by her, if not by Anne.

“I see,” she said, and not without pride either. Whatever was fine in him, whatever reacted from an Eflie come to earth, was due to her, and she was proud of him even when, as now, he used her tempered steel against her.

Anne watched with a grim appreciation his anxiety to make a pikestaff plain. “We all see,” she said. “You’re none so deep and we’re none so daft as all that. You’ve got a maggot in your brain, and I know the shape of it. I’ve had the same in mine, and if you’ll think back ten years, you’ll know what I mean. We’re the same breed, Sam, and we can both do silly things and stand by then and suffer for them. I flitted from you to Madge, and I didn’t set eyes on you from that day till last night. That’s what I mean by suffering.”

And there, in those few words, the tragedy of ten years stood confessed. Parted from Sam, she lived in exile, suffering, and, of course, he had known it and deliberately forgot it, so that the point of her revelation was not its truth, but the amazing fact that she should speak of it at all. Anne had the pride which suffers silently.

“Mother!” he said, distressed for her.

“Nay, none of that,” she bade him harshly. “If I were soft enough to let it hurt me, that’s my look out. But here’s the point, Sam. There’s another woman soft about you, too, and she’s not the same as me. I’d had you since I bore you, and I were not young when you and me came to a parting; but she’s young, and you’ll none make Eflie suffer the road I suffered while there’s strength in me to say you nay. I’d have gone to my grave without your knowing this if it hadn’t been for Effie. It’s not good for a man to know too much. They’re easy stuffed with pride.”

She pretended, with deep magnanimity, to think that he had not known until she told him, but they both knew very well that he had always known. She dwelt deliberately on it now to inform him, not of her suffering, but of the intensity of her feeling for Effie. It was so intense that she could speak of her own suffering: for Effie’s sake she had unveiled, thrown off her stoicism, and flung the spoken truth as a challenge and a revelation at him.

He knew what speaking in this manner cost her, but he was stubborn still in relating all she said to her ungovernable hate of Ada; whereas Anne did not hate Ada ungovernably, but only when Ada hurt Sam.

Again he said “Mother!” and got no further with it.

“I know I’m your mother,” she said, “and you can stop thinking of me now and think of Effie.”

“I’m trying to,” he said.

“Well?” said Anne impatiently. She hadn’t imagined an obstinacy which would not yield to what she had said. Surely he knew the sacrifice of pride she made in saying it! And there was Effie, too, who said little and looked the more.

“I don’t know,” he despaired.

“Then others must know for you,” said Anne, and when his lips only tightened at that, “Sam,” she pleaded, “surely you’ll never go against the pair of us.”

But there were two Effies, and he wasn’t “going against” them both, while he held Anne to be mesmerized by hate of Ada. For all that, it desolated him to be in opposition to them now, to Anne and Effie, the women who counted, the women who gave. “Still,” he had to say, “there’s Ada.”

He said it, as he hoped to say it, finally. He wanted to get away from these two, to escape from their distracting presence to a place where he could think. After all, Hartle Pike had not settled his problem, and he must try somewhere else—Platt Fields, perhaps. They had a sort of space.

But he could not escape—not, at least, till Anne had played her ace. Anne had not finished yet, though she had hoped ten years in the wilderness had been enough. It seemed that they were not, and she must wander still. Well, she could do what she must.

“Oh, aye,” she said dryly, “there’s Ada. There’s your bad ha’penny, and I reckon summat’ll have to be done with her. But if you’ll stop worrying, lad, and if worst comes to the worst, I’ll take Ada on myself.”

Effie started towards her. “No, no,” she cried.

“You hold your hush,” said Anne. This was Anne’s game, not Effie’s.

Sam was still staring at her. “You!” he said. “What can you do?”

“I can see you and Effie happy, and I dunno as owt else matters.” It did not matter what the cost was to Anne. “When you used to come home to your tea from Mr. Travers’ office, what you left was always good enough for me, and I can stomach your leavings still.”

It startled Effie, who had thought herself a specialist in sacrifice. This was the very ferocity of self-denial.

So far, tired and overstrained, Effie had found peace in resigning the leadership to Anne, but here was a lead she could not follow. It was not that she mistook Anne’s purpose or doubted her capacity. Her faith in Anne was young but adamantine, and she knew that if Anne replaced Sam with Ada, and made herself heir to the Marbeck plan, she would unquestionably do for Ada what Sam had undertaken to do. But the thing was simply not good enough.

“No, Mrs. Branstone, no,” she said firmly.

“Get oft’ with you,” said Anne impolitely. “I can tackle Ada with one hand tied behind my back.”

“Of course,” Sam agreed, “you could, but you are not going to. Ada’s my job.”

“I can be pig-headed as well as you, my lad,” Anne menaced him.

“It’s not that, mother.”

“No, it isn’t that,” said Effie, conceiving perhaps that it was time for her to enter into this tragicomedy of rivalry in self-surrender. “Sam’s right. Ada does matter, and it is I who am the failure, I who have broken faith, I who was arrogant. I thought that I could bear a torch, and I can only bear a child. But I know now what I have to do. I can go away. I can disappear.”

It seemed to Anne that this was serious because obviously it was a way out; but she thought it a way much more appalling in prospect than the plan she had proposed for herself of “taking Ada on.” She took alarm. In another than Effie it might have been heroics, but Effie’s was not the stuff that mouths bravado. Anne granted that, and saw a tragic chasm yawn She signalled her alarm to Sam, who answered it with a glance which made appeal to her, whilst yielding nothing of his obstinacy.

“If you go away,” he said, “my mother goes with you. I’ve meant that from the first.”

Anne nodded without enthusiasm. Certainly that was a solution and equally not the solution. It gave Sam to Ada, and Effie, it appeared, was not seeing it as a solution at all. There were strange possibilities, Anne thought, in this young woman, and she did not want them to be tested too far. Effie was not a talker, and when she said a thing she did not overstate. There was danger. Well, Anne was forewarned, and addressed herself in her most humorous, common-sense manner to laugh it out of court. One can deal with danger in worse ways than to apply to it the acid—ridicule.

She put her arms akimbo and surveyed Effie and Sam appraisingly. “I dunno,” she said, “that there’s a pin to choose between the three of us for chuckle-headed foolishness. We’re all fancying ourselves as hard as we can for martyrs and arranging Ada’s life for her. It hasn’t struck any of us yet that Ada’s likely to arrange things for herself.”

And if Sam’s impulse was to say gloomily: “It isn’t likely at all,” he repressed it when Anne’s eye caught his, and said instead, “That’s so,” without knowing why he said it and without believing it.

The flicker of a smile crossed Effie’s face; Sam as conspirator struck her as crudely humorous. Anne saw the smile and understood, but brazened it out. “Of course it’s so,” she said, defying Effie. “Ada’s a poor thing of a woman, but she’s none beyond having a mind and speaking it. I was always one to take the short road out of trouble, so I’ll go along to Peter Struggles’ now.”

“Very well,” consented Effie, and Anne understood her to mean that the crisis, if one had impended, was postponed. “But,” said Effie, “of course, I saw.”

Which was, in its way, a challenge; it was, at any rate, to tell Anne that Effie knew what had been suspected of her.

Anne met it as a challenge. “Well?” she said.

“You were quite wrung, Mrs. Branstone,” said Effie quietly. “I’m not a coward.”

Anne was tying her bonnet-si rings, and found it convenient to look down. She preferred, just then, not to meet Effie’s eye. “I know I’m overanxious,” she mumbled in apology.

“And there’s no need,” said Effie, a little cruel in her victory.

To Sam the conversation seemed to have slipped into another dimension. He hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about.