So they sulked a bit, sitting each side of Chris, and she didn’t laugh, but looked fearsomely solemn. Then Ewan opened the milk-bottles and got out the bread and Ellen spread out the papers for a tablecloth, two sleek black heads under Chris’s gaze; and they fed her solemn, though Ellen peeped at Ewan through those dangerous lashes—she’d trip on them some time. But he wasn’t thinking of her at all, his mind far off with his ancient men, he began to tell them of that time that had been, how close in the generations these men were, how alike ourselves in the things they believed, unessentials different—blood, bone, thought the same. For if history had any lesson at all it was just that men hadn’t changed a bit since the days of the folk in the Spanish caves who painted the charging aurochsen—except to take up civilization, that ancient calamity that fell on the world with gods and kings and culture and classes—Ellen cried But then you’re a Socialist!

Ewan looked blank, smooth boy face, angel-devil eyes, suddenly dragged from his ancient Picts: What’s that to do with it? And Ellen said Everything. If there was once a time without gods and classes couldn’t there be that time again?

Ewan said I suppose so. I don’t much care. It won’t come in our time. I’ve my own life to lead—and at that the slim quean seemed to forget all her hunger, curling lashes and dimpled ways, she said Mr Tavendale was talking rot, how could anyone live a free life in this age?—capitalism falling to bits everywhere, or raising up classes of slaves again, Fascism coming, the rule of the beast—

Ewan sat and munched bread They won’t rule me. I’m myself. —You’re not. You’re a consequence and product as all of us are. If we’re all the children of those old-time men that you’ve told us about do you think for a moment we aren’t more the children of our fathers and mothers and the things we’ve read and depended upon? Just silly to say that we’re not. And Ewan asked what had that to do with it?; and they lost their tempers; and Chris fell asleep.

When she woke they were nowhere in sight; far off, drowsy, a ring-dove crooned in the little woods scampering down to Echt, remoter still a peesie cried. The sun had wheeled to afternoon, red on the nearer mountain cliffs, blue far in the upper heights. Mountain on mountain: there was Bennachie ahint which the tired folk went in song. Sitting with her hands so propping her, Chris found herself aching, sun-wearied and sad, in the bright day’s glister curiously lost though she knew that Ewan and the English quean couldn’t be far off, they’d come if she cried. Call?—behave like a frightened old wife?

She lay back again in the heather bells, and under her ears heard whispers unceasing, sounds soft and urgent and quieter than mice, the little world of the little beasts about its existence of sowing and harvest, feeding and fighting and a pridesome begetting, moral and urgent and dreadfully unsweir, pelting through lives as brief as a blink as though the blink lasted a hundred years. It felt like God so to lie and listen—so long’s the beasts didn’t come climbing up a stalk and mistake one’s ear for heaven.