One morning at dawn Anne was wakened by Colin’s voice in her room.

“Anne, are you awake?”

The room was full of the white dawn.  She saw him standing in it by her bedside.

“My head’s awfully queer,” he said.  “I can feel my brain shaking and wobbling inside it, as if the convolutions had come undone.  Could they?”

“Of course they couldn’t.”

“The noise might have loosened them.”

“It isn’t your brain you feel, Colin.  It’s your nerves.  It’s just the shock still going on in them.”

“Is it never going to stop?”

“Yes, when you’re stronger.  Go back to bed and I’ll come to you.”

He went back.  She slipped on her dressing-gown and came to him.  She sat by his bed and put her hand on his forehead.

“There—­it stops when you put your hand on.”

“Yes.  And you’ll sleep.”

Presently, to her joy, he slept.

She stood up and looked at him as he lay there in the white dawn.  He was utterly innocent, utterly pathetic in his sleep, and beautiful.  Sleep smoothed out his vexed face and brought back the likeness of the boy Colin, Jerrold’s brother.

That morning a letter came to her from Jerrold.  He wrote:  “Don’t worry too much about Col-Col.  He’ll be all right as long as you’ll look after him.”

She thought:  “I wonder whether he remembers that he asked me to.”

But she was glad he was not there to hear Colin scream.

iii

“Anne, can you sleep?” said Adeline.  Colin had gone to bed and they were sitting together in the drawing-room for the last hour of the evening.

“Not very well, when Colin has such bad nights.”

“Do you think he’s ever going to get right again?”

“Yes.  But it’ll take time.”

“A long time?”

“Very long, probably.”

“My dear, if it does, I don’t know how I’m going to stand it.  And if I only knew what was happening to Jerrold and Eliot.  Sometimes I wonder how I’ve lived through these five years.  First, Robert’s death; then the War.  And before that there was nothing but perfect happiness.  I think trouble’s worse to bear when you’ve known nothing but happiness before....  If I could only die instead of all these boys, Anne.  Why can’t I?  What is there to live for?”

“There’s Jerrold and Eliot and Colin.”

“Oh, my dear, Jerrold and Eliot may never come back.  And look at poor Colin. That isn’t the Colin I know.  He’ll never be the same again.  I’d almost rather he’d been killed than that he should be like this.  If he’d lost a leg or an arm....  It’s all very well for you, Anne.  He isn’t your son.”

“You don’t know what he is,” said Anne.  She thought:  “He’s Jerrold’s brother.  He’s what Jerrold loves more than anything.”

“No,” said Adeline.  “Everything ended for me when Robert died.  I shall never marry again.  I couldn’t bear to put anybody in Robert’s place.”