"It's all right, Jerry," he said. "It's all right." He gave a little choking cough. His eyes darkened with a sudden anxiety, a fear. His hand slackened. His head sank forward. Anne came between them. Jerrold felt the slight thrust of her body pushing him aside. He saw her arms stretched out, and the white gleam of the basin, then, the haemorrhage, jet after jet. Then his father's face tilted up on Eliot's arm, very white, and Anne stooping over him tenderly, and her hand with the towel, wiping the red foam from his lips. Then eyes glazed between half-shut lids, mouth open, and the noise of death. Eliot's arm laid down its burden. He got up and put his hand on Jerrold's shoulder and led him out of the room. "Go out into the air," he said. "I'll tell Mother." Jerrold staggered downstairs, and through the hall and out into the blinding sunshine. Far down the avenue he could hear the whirring of the car coming back from Cheltenham; the lines of the beech trees opened fan-wise to let it through. He saw Colin sitting up beside Scarrott. Above his head a lattice ground and clattered. Somebody was going through the front rooms, shutting the windows and pulling down the blinds. Jerrold turned back into the house to meet Colin there. Upstairs his father's door opened and shut softly and Anne came out. She moved along the gallery to her room. Between the dark rails he could see her white skirt, and her arm, hanging, and the little specks of red splashed on the white sleeve. iii Jerrold was afraid of Anne, and he saw no end to his fear. He had been dashed against the suffering he was trying to put away from him and the shock of it had killed in one hour his young adolescent passion. She would be for ever associated with that suffering. He would never see Anne without thinking of his father's death. He would never think of his father's death without seeing Anne. He would see her for ever through an atmosphere of pain and horror, moving as she had moved in his father's room. He couldn't see her any other way. This intolerable memory of her effaced all other memories, memories of the child Anne with the rabbit, of the young, happy Anne who walked and rode and played with him, of the strange, mysterious Anne he had found yesterday in her room at dawn. That Anne belonged to a time he had done with. There was nothing left for him but the Anne who had come to tell him his father was dying, who had brought him to his father's death-bed, who had bound herself up inseparably with his death, who only moved from the scene of it to appear dressed in black and carrying the flowers for his funeral.