"She says them to everybody. She doesn't mean them."
"Oh, doesn't she!… Is that mother? You might tell her I'm sleeping."
For Colin was afraid of his mother, too. He was afraid that she would talk, that she would talk about the War and about Jerrold. Colin had been home six weeks and he had not once spoken Jerrold's name. He read his letters and handed them to Anne and Adeline without a word. It was as if between him and the thought of Jerrold there was darkness and a supreme, nameless terror.
One morning at dawn Anne was wakened by Colin's voice in her room.
"Anne, are you awake?"
The room was full of the white dawn. She saw him standing in it by her bedside.
"My head's awfully queer," he said. "I can feel my brain shaking and wobbling inside it, as if the convolutions had come undone. Could they?"
"Of course they couldn't."
"The noise might have loosened them."
"It isn't your brain you feel, Colin. It's your nerves. It's just the shock still going on in them."