How great that respite was he told her, not knowing that he told her, in a hundred tragi-comic ways. She was ready to cry over his little comfortable movements in his chair, his new, observant appreciation of the decencies of life. His extraordinary interest in the concerns of the Gedges and the Clouds and the Mouldes, expressed as it was with all the old lordliness of manner, was so funny that, but for the lump in her throat, she could have laughed outright. Dear Justin—he had always been thorough!... And then her attention would be caught afresh by some unwonted gesture, some unfamiliar sentiment: and she would tell herself anxiously that her disturbance was out of all proportion to such causes. They were trifles, merest trifles ... but they pained and touched her. It struck her that he was boisterous in his laughter over very simple jokes. He moved more heavily, had acquired a nervous trick of the hands. He was patently anxious to put the war out of his mind, and it was obvious that he could not do it. They would find themselves talking of the war, he speaking as if compelled, yet with increasing unwillingness, flagging into dull silence, and then, rousing himself, beginning to talk of it again, formally, lifelessly, incessantly. Bad for him—she knew that it was bad for him.... She wondered if he thought her efforts to divert him mere callousness?... Yet surely he must have his holiday in peace?... It was their business—hers and his mother’s—to see that he went back to his intolerable duty with an aired and rested mind. But how?... Was it, she wondered, better for him first to disburden himself as he wanted, yet did not want, to do?... But at that she was, again, uneasily aware of change in him, of a new reserve between them, a reserve born, not of their personal estrangement, but of an experience unshared. Where she had imagined, he had seen. It was not wonderful if, subconsciously, he distrusted her capacity, the capacity of any safe and sheltered woman, to enter into his memories, see with his eyes. But she, acknowledging, not the justice, but the inevitability of his attitude, thought only, ‘What does that matter? The thing is to make him rest. I’m a poor creature if I can’t get him out of himself.’... And on the third day she got her opportunity. The second had passed in a whirl of excitement and laughter (only a little forced) and pleasure at his return, and anxiety and fondness for his mother, in silent meals that had given Laura her first inkling of the cloud upon him. On the third day he had gone to town to do his necessary shopping, and, in delighted extravagance, had brought back half Covent Garden for Mrs. Cloud, and chocolates for no one in particular, and complicated mechanical toys that did not appease Timothy. For Timothy, playing second fiddle for the first time since his grandmother had adopted him, had a grievance against his Uncle Justin. Timothy gave Laura a bad moment as she put him to bed.