He was now definitely separated from his wife.  Queenie had come back from the war a year ago.  As soon as it was over she had begun to rage and consult lawyers and write letters two or three times a week, threatening to drag Anne and Colin through the Divorce Court.  But Miss Mullins (once the secretary of Dr. Cutler’s Field Ambulance Corps), recovering at the Farm from an excess of war work, reassured them.  Queenie, she said, was only bluffing.  Queenie was not in a position to bring an action against any husband, she had been too notorious herself.  Miss Mullins had seen things, and she intimated that no defence could stand against the evidence she could give.

And in the end Queenie left off talking about divorce and contented herself with a judicial separation.

Colin still woke every morning to his dread of some blank, undefined disaster; but, as if Queenie and the war had made one obsession, he was no longer haunted by the imminent crash of phantom shells.  It was settled that he was to live with Jerrold and Maisie when they came back to the Manor, while Anne stayed on by herself at the Farm.

Every now and then Eliot came down to see them.  He had been sent home early in nineteen-seventeen with a shrapnel wound in his left leg, the bone shattered.  He obtained his discharge at the price of a permanent limp, and went back to his research work.

For the last two years he had been investigating trench fever, with results that were to make him famous.  But that was not for another year.

In February, nineteen-nineteen, Jerrold had come back.  He and Maisie had been living in London ever since he had left the Army, filling in time till Wyck Manor would be no longer a Home for Convalescent Soldiers.  He had tried to crowd into this interval all the amusement he hadn’t had for four years.  His way was to crush down the past with the present; to pile up engagements against the future, party on party, dances on suppers and suppers on plays; to dine every evening at some place where they hadn’t dined before; to meet lots of nice amusing people with demobilised minds who wouldn’t talk to him about the war; to let himself go in bursts of exquisitely imbecile laughter; never to be quiet for an hour, never to be alone with himself, never to be long alone with Maisie.

After the first week of it this sort of thing ceased to amuse him, but he went on with it because he thought it amused Maisie.

There was something he missed; something he wanted and hadn’t got.  At night, when he lay awake, alone with himself at last, he knew that it was Anne.

And he went on laughing and amusing Maisie; and Maisie, with a heart-breaking sweetness, laughed back at him and declared herself amused.  She had never had such a jolly time in all her life, she said.

Then, very early in the spring, Maisie went down to her people in Yorkshire to recover from the jolly time she had had.  The convalescent soldiers had all gone, and Wyck Manor, rather worn and shabby, was Wyck Manor again.