And then, queerly and suddenly, Ewan’s heart moved. He said to Ellen: We’re into Kinraddie.

She’d never heard of it, he’d been born here, away up in a little farm in the hills, they’d see the place in a minute or so. And sure so they did, ringed round with its beech, Blawearie wheeling and unfolding, high, Εwan minded a day as a little lad standing by the side of his mother by the hackstock and watching a man in a soldier’s gear going out of the close and not looking back: and his mother paying no heed to the man, the man’s hands trembling as he fastened the gate…. So bright and near and close was the picture he shook his head to shake it away, he’d never remembered it before. That man—his father, he supposed, in the days of the War, going to the War, had he and Chris quarrelled? … Long ago, it had nothing to do with him.

His movement made Ellen ask if he was cold, and he turned and looked into her face, bright, flushed, little beads of sweat along her dark brows, she had opened the neck of her dress, skin warm and olive, he stared at that, looked like silk, maybe felt like it to touch. She asked, peeping a smile, if there was a smut on her nose? and saw the grey-gold eyes lose their dull film a moment. He said Nice of you to take me out. No, I’m not cold—and there isn’t a smut. Devil of a stour this bus is raising!

The roads were dry and they ploughed a dust cloud in the wake of a wandering bouroch of sheep, maa’ing and scattering, the shepherd waved a canny hand to the driver and the driver wormed a canny way forward. Then the bus picked up and shoggled up through Drumlithie, the steeple still there: tell Ellen the joke.

They both craned out to look up at it, the steeple bell with no church behind; and Ellen’s smooth braid of short-cut hair, blue-black, whipped Ewan’s cheek like the touch of a bird, swift, with the smell of the Spring.

And his mind at that touch remembered again the Horror: but it was in some way dimmer, queer, as though something were hiding it away. And he sat and puzzled on that while Ellen looked sideways at him and thought in a panic he looked more shut-away and lost than ever, what if she failed?—Oh, she couldn’t do that…. And again that flush started near the tips of her ears and spread out and under, cheekily, and the bus wheeled on and up into Segget, shining half-dead with its whitewashed walls.

Ewan looked back as they left the place and saw the Manse high up from the toun, and above it the ruined castle of the Kaimes where he’d gathered flints when he was a kid—a million and a half or so years ago. God, what a solemn young ass he had been!