“Of course you couldn’t.  I know it’s been awful for you, Auntie.”

“I couldn’t bear it, Anne, if I didn’t believe that there is Something Somewhere.  I can’t think how you get on without any religion.”

“How do you know I haven’t any?”

“Well, you’ve no faith in Anything.  Have you, ducky?”

“I don’t know what I’ve faith in.  It’s too difficult.  If you love people, that’s enough, I think.  It keeps you going through everything.”

“No, it doesn’t.  It’s all the other way about.  It’s loving people that makes it all so hard.  If you didn’t love them you wouldn’t care what happened to them.  If I didn’t love Colin I could bear his shell-shock better.”

“If I didn’t love him, I couldn’t bear it at all.”

“I expect,” said Adeline, “we both mean the same thing.”

Anne thought of Adeline’s locked door; and, in spite of her love for her, she had a doubt.  She wondered whether in this matter of loving they had ever meant the same thing.  With Adeline love was a passive state that began and ended in emotion.  With Anne love was power in action.  More than anything it meant doing things for the people that you loved.  Adeline loved her husband and her sons, but she had run away from the sight of Robert’s haemorrhage, she had tried to keep back Eliot and Jerrold from the life they wanted, she locked her door at night and shut Colin out.  To Anne that was the worst thing Adeline had done yet.  She tried not to think of that locked door.

“I suppose,” said Adeline, “you’ll leave me now your father’s coming home?”

John Severn’s letter lay between them on the table.  He was retiring after twenty-five years of India.  He would be home as soon as his letter.

“I shall do nothing of the sort,” said Anne.  “I shall stay as long as you want me.  If father wants me he must come down here.”

In another three days he had come.

iv

He had grey hair now and his face was a little lined, a little faded, but he was slender and handsome still—­handsomer, more distinguished, Adeline thought, than ever.

Again he sat out with her on the terrace when the October days were warm; he walked with her up and down the lawn and on the flagged paths of the flower garden.  Again he followed her from the drawing-room to the library where Colin was, and back again.  He waited, ready for her.

Again Adeline smiled her self-satisfied, self-conscious smile.  She had the look of a young girl, moving in perfect happiness.  She was perpetually aware of him.

One night Colin called out to Anne that he couldn’t sleep.  People were walking about outside under his window.  Anne looked out.  In the full moonlight she saw Adeline and her father walking together on the terrace.  Adeline was wrapped in a long cloak; she held his arm and they leaned toward each other as they walked.  His man’s voice sounded tender and low.