"It's no use," Adeline said. "I cannot stand the strain of it. Anne,

he's worse with me than he is with you. Everything I say and do is

wrong. You don't know what 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

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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 horror. And as he

was afraid to be left alone Anne sat with him.




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