But he was safe with Anne because they were not in love with each other.  She left his senses at rest, and her affection never called for any emotional response.  She took him away from his fear; she kept him back in his childhood, in his boyhood, in the years before Queenie, with a continual, “Do you remember?”

“Do you remember the walk to High Slaughter?”

“Do you remember the booby-trap we set for poor Pinkney?”

That was dangerous, for poor Pinkney was at the War.

“Do you remember Benjy?”

“Yes, rather.”

But Benjy was dangerous, too; for Jerrold had given him to her.  She could feel Colin shying.

“He had a butterfly smut,” he said.  “Hadn’t he? ...Do you remember how I used to come and see you at Cheltenham?”

“And Grannie and Aunt Emily, and how you used to play on their piano.  And how Grannie jumped when you came down crash on those chords in the Waldstein.”

“Do you mean the presto?”

“Yes.  The last movement.”

“No wonder she jumped.  I should jump now.”  He turned his mournful face to her.  “Anne—­I shall never be able to play again.”

There was danger everywhere.  In the end all ways led back to Colin’s malady.

“Oh yes, you wall when you’re quite strong.”

“I shall never be stronger.”

“You will.  You’re stronger already.”

She knew he was stronger.  He could sleep three hours on end now and he had left off screaming.

And still the doors were left open between their rooms at night.  He was still afraid to sleep alone; he liked to know that she was there, close to him.

Instead of the dreams, instead of the sudden rushing, crashing horror, he was haunted by a nameless dread.  Dread of something he didn’t know, something that waited for him, something he couldn’t face.  Something that hung over him at night, that was there with him in the morning, that came between him and the light of the sun.

Anne kept it away.  Anne came between it and him.  He was unhappy and frightened when Anne was not there.

It was always, “You’re not going, Anne?”

“Yes.  But I’m coming back.”

“How soon?”

And she would say, “An hour;” or, “Half an hour,” or, “Ten minutes.”

“Don’t be longer.”

“No.”

And then:  “I don’t know how it is, Anne.  But everything seems all right when you’re there, and all wrong when you’re not.”

ii

The Manor Farm house stands in the hamlet of Upper Speed.  It has the grey church and churchyard beside it and looks across the deep road towards Sutton’s farm.

The beautiful Jacobean house, the church and church-yard, Sutton’s farm and the rectory, the four cottages and the Mill, the river and its bridge, lie close together in the small flat of the valley.  Green pastures slope up the hill behind them to the north; pink-brown arable lands, ploughed and harrowed, are flung off to either side, east and west.