He stood close beside her in his white flannels, straight and slender.  He was looking at her, just as he looked at Colin.

“Do you like him?” he said.

“Who?  Colin?”

“No.  Benjy.”

“I love him.”

“I’ll give him to you if you’d like to have him.”

“For my own?  To keep?”

“Rather.”

“Don’t you want him?”

“Yes.  But I’d like you to have him.”

“Oh, Jerrold.”

She knew he was giving her Benjy because her mother was dead.

“I’ve got the grey doe, and the fawn, and the lop-ear,” he said.

“Oh—­I shall love him.”

“You mustn’t hold him too tight.  And you must be careful not to touch his stomach.  If you squeeze him there he’ll die.”

“Yes.  If you squeeze his stomach he’ll die,” Colin cried excitedly.

“I’ll be ever so careful.”

They put him down, and he ran violently round and round, drumming with his hind legs on the floor of the shed, startling the does that couched, like cats, among the lettuce leaves and carrots.

“When the little rabbits come half of them will be yours, because he’ll be their father.”

“Oh—­”

For the first time since Friday week Anne was happy.  She loved the rabbit, she loved little Colin.  And more than anybody or anything she loved Jerrold.

Yet afterwards, in her bed in the night nursery, when she thought of her dead mother, she lay awake crying; quietly, so that nobody could hear.

v

It was Robert Fielding’s birthday.  Anne was to dine late that evening, sitting beside him.  He said that was his birthday treat.

Anne had made him a penwiper of green cloth with a large blue bead in the middle for a knob.  He was going to keep it for ever.  He had no candles on his birthday cake at tea, because there would have been too many.

The big hall of the Manor was furnished like a room.

The wide oak staircase came down into it from a gallery that went all around.  They were waiting there for Mrs. Fielding who was always a little late.  That made you keep on thinking about her.  They were thinking about her now.

Up there a door opened and shut.  Something moved along the gallery like a large light, and Mrs. Fielding came down the stairs, slowly, prolonging her effect.  She was dressed in her old pearl-white gown.  A rope of pearls went round her neck and hung between her breasts.  Roll above roll of hair jutted out at the back of her head; across it, the foremost curl rose like a comb, shining.  Her eyes, intensely blue in her milk-white face, sparkled between two dark wings of hair.  Her mouth smiled its enchanting and enchanted smile.  She was aware that her husband and John watched her from stair to stair; she was aware of their men’s eyes, darkening.  Then suddenly she was aware of John’s daughter.

Anne was coming towards her across the hall, drawn by the magic, by the eyes, by the sweet flower smell that drifted (not lavender, not lavender).  She stood at the foot of the staircase looking up.  The heavenly thing swept down to her and she broke into a cry.