Going down in the train he thought of her, a little girl with short black hair, holding a black-and-white rabbit against her breast, a little girl with a sweet mouth ready for kisses, who hung herself round his neck with sudden, loving arms.  A big girl with long black hair tied in an immense black bow, a girl too big for kisses.  A girl sitting in her room between her white bed and the window with a little black cat in her arms.  Her platted hair lay in a thick black rope down her back.  He remembered how he had kissed her; he remembered the sliding of her sweet face against his, the pressure of her darling head against his shoulder, the salt taste of her tears.  It was inconceivable that he had not loved Anne then.  Why hadn’t he?  Why had he let his infernal cowardice stop him?  Eliot had loved her.

Then he remembered Colin.  Little Col-Col running after them down the field, calling to them to take him with them; Colin’s hands playing; Colin’s voice singing Lord Rendal.  He tried to think of Queenie, the woman Colin had married.  He had no image of her.  He could see nothing but Colin and Anne.

She was there alone at the station to meet him.  She came towards him along the platform.  Their eyes looked for each other.  Something choked his voice back.  She spoke first.

“Jerrold------”

“Anne.”  A strange, thick voice deep down in his throat.

Their hands clasped one into the other, close and strong.

“Colin wanted to come, but I wouldn’t let him.  It would have been too much for him.  He might have cried or something ...  You mustn’t mind if he cries when he sees you.  He isn’t quite right yet.”

“No, but he’s better.”

“Ever so much better.  He can do things on the farm now.  He looks after the lambs and the chickens and the pigs.  It’s good for him to have something to do.”

Jerrold agreed that it was good.

They had reached the Manor Farm now.

“Don’t take any notice if he cries,” she said.

Colin waited for him in the hall of the house.  He was trying hard to control himself, but when he saw Jerrold coming up the path he broke down in a brief convulsive crying that stopped suddenly at the touch of Jerrold’s hand.

Anne left them together.

iv

“Don’t go, Anne.”

Colin called her back when she would have left them, again after dinner.

“Don’t you want Jerrold to yourself?” she said.

“We don’t want you to go, do we, Jerrold?”

“Rather not.”

Jerrold found himself looking at them all the time.  He had tried to persuade himself that what his mother had told him was not true.  But he wasn’t sure.  Look as he would, he was not sure.

If only his mother hadn’t told him, he might have gone on believing in what she had called their innocence.  But she had shown him what to look for, and for the life of him he couldn’t help seeing it at every turn:  in Anne’s face, in the way she looked at Colin, the way she spoke to him; in her kindness to him, her tender, quiet absorption.  In the way Colin’s face turned after her as she came and went; in his restlessness when she was not there; in the peace, the sudden smoothing of his vexed brows, when having gone she came back again.