ack. 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."

"What else did Eliot say?"

"Oh, he thinks perhaps he might be better at the Farm than up here. He
thinks it's bad for him sleeping in that room where he was frightened
when he was a kid. He says it all hooks on to that. What's more, he says
he may go on having these relapses for years. Any noise or strain or
excitement'll bring them on. Do you mind his being at the Farm again?"

"Mind? Of course I don't. If I'm to look after him _and_ the land it'll
be very much easier there than here."

For every night at Colin's bedtime Anne came up to the Manor. She slept
in the room that was to be Maisie's. When Colin screamed she went to him
and sat with him till he slept again. In the morning she went back to
the Farm.

She had been doing this for a week now, and Colin was better.

But he didn't want to go back. If, he said, Jerrold