I'll try and tell you how it's been. It's two months now since mother went away. That night it was dreadful. He walked up and down his room all night. Indeed he's been doing that ever since she went. And yet I don't think it's of her that he's thinking most. I'm not sure even that he's thinking of her at all. He's concentrating everything now on the Pybus appointment. He talks to himself. (You can see by that how changed he is.) He is hurrying round to see people and asking them to the house, and he's so odd with them, looking at them suddenly, suspiciously, as though he expected that they were laughing at him. There's always something in the back of his mind-- not mother, I'm sure. Something happened to him that last day of the Jubilee. He's always talking about some one who struck him, and he puts his hand up to feel his forehead, where there was a bruise. He told me that day that he had fallen down, but I'm sure now that he had a fight with somebody. He's always talking, too, about a "conspiracy" against him--not only Canon Ronder, but something more general. Poor dear, the worst of it all is, how bewildered he is. You know how direct he used to be, the way he went straight to his point and wasn't afraid of anybody. Now he's always hesitating. He hesitates before he goes out, before he goes upstairs, before he comes into my room. It's just as though he was for ever expecting that there's some one behind the door waiting for him with a hammer. It's so strange how I've changed my feeling about him. I used to think him so strong that he could beat down anybody, and now I feel he wants looking after all the time. Perhaps he never was really strong at all, but it was all on the outside. All the same he's very brave too. He knows all the town's been talking about him, but I think he'd face a whole world of Polchesters if he could only beat Canon Ronder over the Pybus appointment. If Mr. Forsyth isn't appointed to that I think he'll go to pieces altogether. You see, a year ago there wouldn't have been any question about it at all. Of course he would have had his way. But what makes me so frightened, Falk, is of something happening in the house. Father is so suspicious that it makes me suspicious too. It doesn't seem like the house it was at all, but as though there were some one hiding in it, and at night it is awful. I lie awake listening, and I can hear father walking up and down, his room's next to mine, you know. And then if I listen hard enough, I can hear footsteps all over the house-- you know how you do in the middle of the night. And there's always some one coming upstairs. This will sound silly to you up in London, but it doesn't seem silly here, I assure you. All the servants feel it, and Gladys is going at the end of the month.