every morning to his dread of some blank, undefined
disaster; but, as if Queenie and the war had made one obsession, he was
no longer haunted by the imminent crash of phantom shells. It was
settled that he was to live with Jerrold and Maisie when they came back
to the Manor, while Anne stayed on by herself at the Farm.

Every now and then Eliot came down to see them. He had been sent home
early in nineteen-seventeen with a shrapnel wound in his left leg, the
bone shattered. He obtained his discharge at the price of a permanent
limp, and went back to his research work.

For the last two years he had been investigating trench fever, with
results that were to make him famous. But that was not for another year.

In February, nineteen-nineteen, Jerrold had come back. He and Maisie had
been living in London ever since he had left the Army, filling in time
till Wyck Manor would be no longer a Home for Convalescent Soldiers. He
had tried to crowd into this interval all the amusement he hadn't had
for four years. His way was to crush down the past with the present; to
pile up engagements against the future, party on party, dances on
suppers and suppers on plays; to dine every evening at some place where
they hadn't dined before; to meet lots of nice amusing people with
demobilised minds who wouldn't talk to him about the war; to let himself
go in bursts of exquisitely imbecile laughter; never to be quiet for an
hour, never to be alone with himself, never to be long alone with
Maisie.

After the first week of it this sort of thing ceased to amuse him, but
he went on with it because he thought it amused Maisie.

There was something he missed; something he wanted and hadn't got. At
night, when he lay awake, alone with himself at last, he knew that it
was Anne.

And he went on laughing and amusing Maisie; and Maisie, with a
heart-breaking sweetness, laughed back at him and declared herself
amused. She had never had such a jolly time in all her life, she said.

Then, very early in the spring, Maisie went down to her people in
Yorkshire to recover from the jolly time she had had. The convalescent
soldiers had all gone, and Wyck Manor, rather worn and shabby, was Wyck
Manor again.

Jerrold came back to it alone.

XII

COLIN, JERROLD, AND ANNE

i

He went through the wide empty house, looking through all the rooms,
trying to find some memory of the happiness he had had there long ago.
The house was full of Anne. A