it was like before you came."

Anne did know. The awful thing was that Colin couldn't bear to be left
alone, day or night. He would lie awake shivering with terror. If he
dropped off to sleep he woke screaming. At first Pinkney slept with him.
But Pinkney had joined up, and old Wilkins, the butler, was impossible
because he snored.

Anne had her old room across the passage where she had slept when they
were children. And now, as then, their doors were left open, so that at
a sound from Colin she could get up and go to him.

She was used to the lacerating, unearthly scream that woke her, the
scream that terrified Adeline, that made her cover her head tight with
the bed-clothes, to shut it out, that made her lock her door to shut out
Colin. Once he had come into his mother's room and she had found him
standing by her bed and looking at her with the queer frightened face
that frightened her. She was always afraid of this happening again.

Anne couldn't bear to think of that locked door. She was used to the
sight of Colin standing in her doorway, to the watches beside his bed
where he lay shivering, holding her hand tight as he used to hold it
when he was a child. To Anne he was "poor Col-Col" again, the little boy
who was afraid of ghosts, only more abandoned to terror, more
unresisting.

He would start and tremble at any quick, unexpected movement. He would
burst into tears at any sudden sound. Small noises, whisperings,
murmurings, creakings, soft shufflings, irritated him. Loud noises, the
slamming of doors, the barking of dogs, the crowing of cocks, made him
writhe in agony. For Colin the deep silence of the Manor was the ambush
for some stupendous, crashing, annihilating sound; sound that was always
coming and never came. The droop of the mouth that used to appear
suddenly in his moments of childish anguish was fixed now, and fixed the
little tortured twist of his eyebrows and his look of anxiety and fear.
His head drooped, his shoulders were hunched slightly, as if he cowered
before some perpetually falling blow.

On fine warm days he lay out on the terrace on Adeline's long chair; on
wet days he lay on the couch in the library, or sat crouching over the
fire. Anne brought him milk or beef tea or Benger's Food every two
hours. He was content to be waited on; he had no will to move, no desire
to get up and do things for himself. He lay or sat still, shivering
every now and then as he remembered or imagined some