day of the midsummer holidays, nineteen hundred. Also
he found a pair of Anne's slippers under the bed, and, caught in a crack
of the dressing-table, one long black hair. This room leading out of
Colin's was Anne's room.

And Colin called out to him, "Do you mind leaving the door open, Jerry?
I can't sleep if it's shut."

v

It was Jerrold's second day. He and Anne climbed the steep beech walk to
the top of the hillock and sat there under the trees. Up the fields on
the opposite rise they could see the grey walls and gables of the Manor,
and beside it their other beech ring at the top of the last field.

They were silent for a while. He was intensely aware of her as she
turned her head round, slowly, to look at him, straight and full.

And the sense of his nearness came over her, soaking in deeper, swamping
her brain. Her wide open eyes darkened; her breathing came in tight,
short jerks; her nerves quivered. She wondered whether he could feel
their quivering, whether he could hear her jerking breath, whether he
could see something queer about her eyes. But she had to look at him,
not shyly, furtively, but straight and full, taking him in.

He was changed. The war had changed him. His face looked harder, the
mouth closer set under the mark of the little clipped fawn-brown
moustache. His eyes that used to flash their blue so gayly, to rest so
lightly, were fixed now, dark and heavy with memory. They had seen too
much. They would never lose that dark memory of the things they had
seen. She wondered, was Colin right? Had the war done worse things to
Jerrold than it had done to him? He would never tell her.

"Jerrold," she said, suddenly, "did you have a good time in India?"

"I suppose so. I dare say I thought I had."

"And you hadn't?"

"Well, I can't conceive how I could have had."

"You mean it seems so long ago."

"No, I don't mean that."

"You've forgotten."

"I don't mean that, either."

Silence.

"Look here, Anne, I want to know about Colin. Has he been very bad?"

"Yes, he has."

"How bad?"

"So bad that sometimes I was glad you weren't there to see him. You
remember when he was a kid, how frightened he used to be at night. Well,
he's been like that all the time. He's like that now, only he's a bit
better. He doesn't scream now.... All the time he kept on worrying about
you. He only told me that the other day. He seemed to think the war must
have done something more frightful to you than