Are you wondering whether we’re going to be happy?

    We shall be so long as I let her have her own way; which is what I mean
    to do.

    Your very affectionate father,

    JOHN SEVERN.

And Anne answered: 

    DEAREST DADDY,—­I shouldn’t dream of reproaching Aunt Adeline any more
    than I should reproach a pussycat for catching birds.

Look after her as much as you please—­I shall look after Colin.  Whether you like it or not, darling, you can’t stop me.  And I won’t let Colin go to a nursing home.  It would be the worst possible place for him.  Ask Eliot.  Besides, he is better.

    I’m ever so glad you’re going to be happy.

    Your loving

    ANNE.

VIII

ANNE AND COLIN

i

Autumn had passed.  Colin’s couch was drawn up before the fire in the drawing-room.  Anne sat with him there.

He was better.  He could listen for half an hour at a time when Anne read to him—­poems, short stories, things that were ended before Colin tired of them.  He ate and drank hungrily and his body began to get back its strength.

At noon, when the winter sun shone, he walked, first up and down the terrace, then round and round the garden, then to the beech trees at the top of the field, and then down the hill to the Manor Farm.  On mild days she drove him about the country in the dog-cart.  She had tried motoring but had had to give it up because Colin was frightened at the hooting, grinding and jarring of the car.

As winter went on Anne found that Colin was no worse in cold or wet weather.  He couldn’t stand the noise and rush of the wind, but his strange malady took no count of rain or snow.  He shivered in the clear, still frost, but it braced him all the same.  Driving or strolling, she kept him half the day in the open air.

She saw that he liked best the places they had gone to when they were children—­the Manor Farm fields, High Slaughter, and Hayes Mill.  They were always going to the places where they had done things together.  When Colin talked sanely he was back in those times.  He was safe there.  There, if anywhere, he could find his real self and be well.

She had the feeling that Colin’s future lay somewhere through his past.  If only she could get him back there, so that he could be what he had been.  There must be some way of joining up that time to this, if only she could find a bridge, a link.  She didn’t know that she was the way, she was the link binding his past to his present, bound up with his youth, his happiness, his innocence, with the years before Queenie and the War.

She didn’t know what Queenie had done to him.  She didn’t know that the war had only finished what Queenie had begun.  That was Colin’s secret, the hidden source of his fear.