And Colin followed her about the farmyard and up the fields till he tired and turned back.  She would see him standing by the gate she had passed through, looking after her with the mournful look he used to have when he was a little boy and they left him behind.

He would stand looking till Anne’s figure, black on her black horse, stood up against the skyline from the curve of the round-topped hill.  It dipped; it dipped and disappeared and Colin would go slowly home.

At the first sound of her horse’s hoofs in the yard he came out to meet her.

One day he said to her, “Jerrold’ll be jolly pleased with what you’ve done when he comes home.”

And then, “If he ever can be pleased with anything again.”

It was the first time he had said Jerrold’s name.

“That’s what’s been bothering me,” he went on.  “I can’t think how Jerrold’s going to get over it.  You remember what he was like when Father died?”

“Yes.”  She remembered.

“Well—­what’s the War going to do to him?  Look what it’s done to me.  He minds things so much more than I do.”

“It doesn’t take everybody the same way, Colin.”

“I don’t suppose Jerrold’ll get shell-shock.  But he might get something worse.  Something that’ll hurt him more.  He must mind so awfully.”

“You may be sure he won’t mind anything that could happen to himself.”

“Of course he won’t.  But the things that’ll happen to other people.  Seeing the other chaps knocked about and killed.”

“He minds most the things that happen to the people he cares about.  To you and Eliot.  They’re the sort of things he can’t face.  He’d pretend they couldn’t happen.  But the war’s so big that he can’t say it isn’t happening; he’s got to stand up to it.  And the things you stand up to don’t hurt you.  I feel certain he’ll come through all right.”

That was the turning point in Colin’s malady.  She thought:  “If he can talk about Jerrold he’s getting well.”

The next day a letter came to her from Jerrold.  He wrote:  “I wish to goodness I could get leave.  I don’t want it all the time.  I’m quite prepared to stick this beastly job for any reasonable period; but a whole year without leave, it’s a bit thick...”

“About Colin.  Didn’t I tell you he’d be all right?  And it’s all you, Anne.  You’ve made him; you needn’t pretend you haven’t.  I want most awfully to see you again.  There are all sorts of things I’d like to say to you, but I can’t write ’em.”

She thought:  “He’s got over it at last, then.  He won’t be afraid of me any more.”

Somehow, since the war she had felt that Jerrold would come back to her.  It was as if always, deep down and in secret, she had known that he belonged to her and that she belonged to him as no other person could; that whatever happened and however long a time he kept away from her he would come back at some time, in some way.  She couldn’t distinguish between Jerrold and her sense of Jerrold; and as nothing could separate her from the sense of him, nothing could separate her from Jerrold himself.  He had part in the profound and secret life of her blood and nerves and brain.