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with Alan, she forced me to recognise the change in him. It was as if she thought that I who had been his closest friend all through his school and university days would hold the key, or could pay the ransom of that part of his mind which was still held captive somewhere. That was how she put it: "They" had sent back his body, more or less sound, and so much of his wits as would carry him through the daily business of managing the small farm his father had left him, but they had kept the rest behind. What had they done to him? Or what had he done to himself during his four years in a prisoner of war camp?
I tried uncomfortably to evade the role of amateur psychiatrist that this confidence seemed to invite me to assume. I uttered some generalisations about war experience and the monotony of prison life--such commonplaces as my memories of conversations with a good number of other former prisoners of war suggested to me; and, besides, I added, perhaps unkindly, Alan was ten years older; she could not expect the boy in him to live for ever. She shook her head. "It's something more personal than that, and I'm sad mainly for Elizabeth's sake." I could but try to assure her half-heartedly that I did not notice so great a change in him.
Certainly the other people there in the drawing-room that particular winter evening seemed to take Alan's inaction or absence of mind for granted, and they had known him well before the war. I think they had no more expected him to intervene in the argument than I had.
There were the Hedleys and their daughter, Elizabeth. Major Hedley was an old neighbour of the Querdilions, retired now, and farming in Thorsway, like Alan. There was also Frank Rowan, Alan's cousin, who was a lecturer in economics at a northern university. Like myself he was spending a week of his vacation with them. These two had known Alan since he was a child. If they thought something was wrong with him they never breathed a word of it to me: they seemed to treat him as a simple, good-natured fel