Jerrold agreed that it was good.
They had reached the Manor Farm now.
"Don't take any notice if he cries," she said.
Colin waited for him in the hall of the house. He was trying hard to
control himself, but when he saw Jerrold coming up the path he broke
down in a brief convulsive crying that stopped suddenly at the touch of
Jerrold's hand.
Anne left them together.
Colin called her back when she would have left them, again after dinner.
"Don't you want Jerrold to yourself?" she said.
"We don't want you to go, do we, Jerrold?"
"Rather not."
Jerrold found himself looking at them all the time. He had tried to
persuade himself that what his mother had told him was not true. But he
wasn't sure. Look as he would, he was not sure.
If only his mother hadn't told him, he might have gone on believing in
what she had called their innocence. But she had shown him what to look
for, and for the life of him he couldn't help seeing it at every turn:
in Anne's face, in the way she looked at Colin, the way she spoke to
him; in her kindness to him, her tender, quiet absorption. In the way
Colin's face turned after her as she came and went; in his restlessness
when she was not there; in the peace, the sudden smoothing of his vexed
brows, when having gone she came back again.
Supposing it were true that they-He couldn't bear it to be true; his mind struggled against the truth of
it, but if it _were_ true he didn't blame them. So far from being untrue
or even improbable, it seemed to Jerrold the most likely thing in the
world to have happened. It had happened to so many people since the war
that he couldn't deny its likelihood. There was only one thing that
could have made it impossible--if Anne had cared for him. And what
reason had he to suppose she cared? After six years? After he had told
her he was trying to get away from her? He had got away; and he saw a
sort of dreadful justice in the event that made it useless for him to
come back. If anybody was to blame it was himself. Himself and Queenie,
that horrible girl Colin had married.
When he asked himself whether it was the sort of thing that Anne would
be likely to do he thought: Why not, if she loved him, if she wanted to
make him happy? How could he tell what Anne would or would not do? She
had said long ago that he couldn't, that she might do anything.
They spent the evening talking, by fits and starts, with long silences
in between. They talked about the things that happened before the war,
before Colin's marriage, the things they had done together. They talked
about the farm and Anne's work, about Barker and Curtis and Ballinger,
about Mrs. Sutton who watched them from her house across the road.