And the sense of his nearness came over her, soaking in deeper, swamping her brain.  Her wide open eyes darkened; her breathing came in tight, short jerks; her nerves quivered.  She wondered whether he could feel their quivering, whether he could hear her jerking breath, whether he could see something queer about her eyes.  But she had to look at him, not shyly, furtively, but straight and full, taking him in.

He was changed.  The war had changed him.  His face looked harder, the mouth closer set under the mark of the little clipped fawn-brown moustache.  His eyes that used to flash their blue so gayly, to rest so lightly, were fixed now, dark and heavy with memory.  They had seen too much.  They would never lose that dark memory of the things they had seen.  She wondered, was Colin right?  Had the war done worse things to Jerrold than it had done to him?  He would never tell her.

“Jerrold,” she said, suddenly, “did you have a good time in India?”

“I suppose so.  I dare say I thought I had.”

“And you hadn’t?”

“Well, I can’t conceive how I could have had.”

“You mean it seems so long ago.”

“No, I don’t mean that.”

“You’ve forgotten.”

“I don’t mean that, either.”

Silence.

“Look here, Anne, I want to know about Colin.  Has he been very bad?”

“Yes, he has.”

“How bad?”

“So bad that sometimes I was glad you weren’t there to see him.  You remember when he was a kid, how frightened he used to be at night.  Well, he’s been like that all the time.  He’s like that now, only he’s a bit better.  He doesn’t scream now....  All the time he kept on worrying about you.  He only told me that the other day.  He seemed to think the war must have done something more frightful to you than it had done to him; he said, because you’d mind it more.  I told him it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d mind most.”

“It isn’t the sort of thing it’s any good minding.  I don’t suppose I minded more than the other chaps.  If anything had happened to you, or him, or Eliot, I’d have minded that.”

“I know.  That’s what I told him.  I knew you’d come through.”

“Eliot was dead right about Colin.  He knew he wouldn’t.  He ought never to have gone out.”

“He wanted so awfully to go.  But Eliot could have stopped him if it hadn’t been for Queenie.  She hunted and hounded him out.  She told him he was funking.  Fancy Colin funking!”

“What’s Queenie like?”

“She’s like that.  She never funks herself, but she wants to make out that everybody else does.”

“Do you like Queenie?”

“No.  I hate her.  I don’t mind her hounding him out so much since she went herself; I do mind her leaving him.  Do you know, she’s never even tried to come and see him.”

“Good God! what a beast the woman must be.  What on earth made him marry her?”