She had not been gone from Jerrold a week before the torture of separation became unbearable.  She had said that she could bear it because she had borne it before, but, as Jerrold had pointed out to her, it wasn’t the same thing now.  There was all the difference in the world between Jerrold’s going away from her because he didn’t want her, and her going away from Jerrold because he did.  It was the difference between putting up with a dull continuous pain you had to bear, and enduring a sharp agony you could end at any minute.  Before, she had only given up what she couldn’t get; now, she was giving up what she could have to-morrow by simply going back to Wyck.

She loathed the flat Essex country and the streets of little white rough cast and red-tiled houses on the Ilford side where the clear fields had once lain beyond the tall elm rows.  She was haunted by the steep, many-coloured pattern of the hills round Wyck, and the grey gables of the Manor.  Love-sickness and home-sickness tore at her together till her heart felt as if it were stretched out to breaking point.

She had only to go back and she would end this pain.  Then on the sixth day Jerrold’s wire came:  “Colin ill again.  Please come back.  Jerrold.”

ii

It was not her fault and it was not Jerrold’s.  The thing had been taken out of their hands.  She had not meant to go and Jerrold had not meant to send for her.  Colin must have made him.  They had lost each other through Colin and now it was Colin who had brought them together.

Colin’s terror had come again.  Again he had the haunting fear of the tremendous rushing noise, the crash always about to come that never came.  He slept in brief fits and woke screaming.

Eliot had been down to see him and had gone.  And again, as before, nobody could do anything with him but Anne.

“I couldn’t,” Jerrold said, “and Eliot couldn’t.  Eliot made me send for you.”

They had left Colin upstairs and were together in the drawing-room.  He stood in the full wash of the sunlight that flooded in through the west window.  It showed his face drawn and haggard, and discoloured, as though he had come through a long illness.  His mouth was hard with pain.  He stared away from her with heavy, wounded eyes.  She looked at him and was frightened.

“Jerrold, have you been ill?”

“No.  What makes you think so?”

“You look ill.  You look as if you hadn’t slept for ages.”

“I haven’t.  I’ve been frightfully worried about Colin.”

“Have you any idea what set him off again?”

“I believe it was those infernal tractors.  He would go out with them after you’d left.  He said he’d have to, as long as you weren’t there.  And he couldn’t stand the row.  Eliot said it would be that.  And the responsibility, the feeling that everything depended on him.”

“I see.  I oughtn’t to have left him.”

“It looks like it.”