It was not until the first of the autumn shooting parties at Stanier was nearly due that Colin came back from his island, and from then till early in December a succession of guests passed through. Sometimes he went up to town with the party that was leaving, returning a few days afterwards with the new relay, and then again he was busy with his duties as host. Sometimes he stopped here in the emptied house, but even then Violet was never once alone with him for any private talk. He pointedly avoided all chance of this, and on the only occasion when she had attempted to break this ring of his seclusion from her, he had flamed into devilish anger. “Oh, for God’s sake clear out!” he said, “if you’ve come for a heart-to-heart talk. You’ll know fast enough if I’ve got anything to say to you.” “But I want to talk to you,” she said. “I haven’t seen you since you left here in August.” He gave her one furious glance. “You’d better go,” he said. Dennis, she knew, wrote to him, for sometimes she would see that laborious and legible script on one of his letters, so different from the cursive scrawl which he gave her. Colin certainly read these, but he never wrote to the boy, and one day there came to Violet, at the end of one of Dennis’s letters, a postscript without comment. “Father has told me not to write to him any more.” There was no reply to be made to that: Dennis had stated it without comment, and without comment it had better remain, for they understood each other on the subject which it concerned. And yet, for some reason which she could not justify and could scarcely even define, Violet felt that, underneath the harshness of that injunction, there lay not so much the desire to wound as the deliberate intention of so doing. Colin had sat down and thought of that: it had not sprung from the open garden of his mind, but had been reared with deliberate care. It had not been derived from instinct, but from craft; that waspish little prohibition was no spontaneous product. She might even regard it as a missile discharged not in offence but in defence.... And then he never spoke of Dennis: not once did the boy’s name pass his lips. To her who knew him so well, and had so often shuddered at what he was, this carried the same interpretation. He wanted no suggestion or reminder of Dennis to come near him, not even to her did he mention him, though it was just here that she was most vulnerable to the taunts and gibes that wounded. It was not like him to spare the most sensitive spot for fear of hurting her; it was much more probable that, somehow or other, he was sensitive there himself, and forbore from a contact at which he would have himself winced.