They came back up the steep pasture, very slowly, Uncle Robert leaning on Jerrold’s arm.  They sat down to rest under the beech-trees at the top.  They looked at the landscape, the many-coloured hills, rolling together, flung off from each other, an endless undulation.

“Beautiful country.  Beautiful country,” said Uncle Robert as if he had never seen it before.

“You should see my farm,” Anne said.  “It’s as flat as a chess-board and all squeezed up by the horrid town.  Grandpapa sold a lot of it for building.  I wish I could sell the rest and buy a farm in the Cotswolds.  Do you ever have farms to sell, Uncle Robert?”

“Well, not to sell.  To let, perhaps, if a tenant goes.  You can have the Barrow Farm when old Sutton dies.  He can’t last long.  But,” he went on, “you’ll find it very different farming here.”

“How different?”

“Well, in some of those fields you’ll have to fight the charlock all the time.  And in some the soil’s hard.  And in some you’ve got to plough across the sun because of the slope of the land...  Remember, Jerrold, Anne’s to have the Barrow Farm, if she wants it, when Sutton dies.”

Jerrold laughed.  “My dear father, I shall be in India.”

“I’ll remind you, Uncle Robert.”

Uncle Robert smiled.  “I’ll tell Barker to remember,” he said.  Barker was his agent.

It was as if he were thinking that when Sutton died he might not be there.  And he had said that Sutton wouldn’t last long.  Anne looked at Jerrold.  But Jerrold’s face was happy.  He didn’t see it.

They left Uncle Robert in the library, drinking hot water for tea.

“Jerrold,” Anne said, “I’m sure Uncle Robert’s ill.”

“Oh no.  It’s only indigestion.  He’ll be as right as rain in a day or two.”

V

Anne’s cat Nicky was dying.

Jerrold struggled with his sleep, pushing it back and back before him, trying to remember.

There was something; something that had hung over him the night before.  He had been afraid to wake and find it there.  Something—.

Now he remembered.

Nicky was dying and Anne was unhappy.  That was what it was; that was what he had hated to wake to, Anne’s unhappiness and the little cat.

There was nothing else.  Nothing wrong with Daddy—­only indigestion.  He had had it before.

The room was still dark, but the leaded squares of the window lattices barred a sky pale with dawn.  In her room across the passage Anne would be sitting up with Nicky.  He remembered now that he had to get up early to make her some tea.

He lit a candle and went to her door to see if she were still awake.  Her voice answered his gentle tapping, “Who’s there?”

“Me.  Jerrold.  May I come in?”

“Yes.  But don’t bring the light in.  He’s sleeping.”

He put out the candle and made his way to her.  Against the window panes he could see the outline of her body sitting upright in a chair.  She glimmered there in her white wrapper and he made out something black stretched straight and still in her lap.  He sat down in the window-seat and watched.