She smiled, her mature, compassionate lips hardly parting. Her eyes moved over his face – over the dark mop of his hair, his powerful jutting brow, and the shadows of his eyes that stared as though fixed in their sockets, at her own. She saw his high cheekbones and the sides of his face that tapered to his chin. His mouth was drawn finely and his shoulders were powerful. Her breast rose and fell, and she was both weak and strong. She could feel the blood flowing within her and she felt that she must die or break forth into leaves and flowers. It was not passion that she felt: not the passion of the body, though that was there, but rather an exultation, a reaching for life, for the whole of the life of which she was capable, and in that life which she but dimly divined was centred love, the love for a man. She was not in love with Rantel: she was in love with what he meant to her as someone she could love.

He moved forward in the light so that his face was darkened to her and only the top of his ruffled hair shone like wire.

‘Keda,’ he whispered.

She took his hand. ‘I have come back.’

He felt her nearness; he held her shoulders in his hands.

‘You have come back,’ he said as though repeating a lesson. ‘Ah, Keda – is this you? You went away. Every night I have watched for you.’ His hands shook on her shoulders. ‘You went away,’ he said.

‘You have followed me?’ said Keda. ‘Why did you not speak to me by the rocks?’

‘I wanted to,’ he said, ‘but I could not.’

‘Oh, why not?’

‘We will move from the lamp and then I will tell you,’ he said at last. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Where? To where should I go but to where I lived – to my house?’

They walked slowly. ‘I will tell you,’ he said suddenly. ‘I followed you to know where you would go. When I knew it was not to Braigon I overtook you.’

‘To Braigon?’ she said. ‘Oh Rantel, you are still as unhappy.’

‘I cannot alter, Keda; I cannot change.’

They had reached the square.

‘We have come here for nothing,’ said Rantel, coming to a halt in the darkness. ‘For nothing, do you hear me, Keda? I must tell you now. Oh, it is bitterness to tell you.’

Nothing that he might say could stop a voice within her that kept crying: ‘I am with you, Keda! I am life! I am life! Oh, Keda, Keda, I am with you!’ But her voice asked him as though something separate from her real self were speaking:

‘Why have we come for nothing?’