Most importantly, however, this feeling of being deep in the forest, alone, alert to everything that he might be about to witness – horror and wonder, both – brought back into Edmund’s heart that familiar excitement which had fed his dreams of discovery and which, since his illness and his sojourn in Sir Ralph’s house, he feared he might have lost for ever. He no longer minded that he didn’t have his knife. His face was scratched as he moved forwards, his hands pricked by thorns and chafed by bark, but he was happier than he had felt for a long time. When he saw a king cobra coiled among the roots of a banana tree, he walked nonchalantly past it.

He didn’t know how much time had passed when he became aware of a change in the light above the canopy. He stopped and looked up and saw that storm clouds were once again gathering. Thunder was just audible, far off as yet, but no doubt coming nearer. Edmund sighed. He had often before been in the forest in drenching rain, but he also knew that a chill always followed if shelter was not quite quickly found. Now, perhaps, he could have wished himself back on the path to the river with Leon and Sir Ralph, but when he turned and looked behind him he was no longer certain in which direction the river lay. He cursed his lack of a compass. Of all the things that had been stolen from him, the loss of the compass troubled him the most.

‘Follow the ants,’ he muttered. ‘Have faith in their purpose.’

And he told himself that when the mine was reached – and it surely couldn’t be very far off now – there would he come upon some remnant of a gold miner’s hut or cabin, decayed with time but quickly made serviceable as a temporary refuge. In this place, he would wait until nature changed her mind again and the sun returned. And he fell to imagining what he might find there in the gold miner’s hovel: some ancient cans of bully beef, a shovel with a broken haft, a sluice box, once rattled back and forth, back and forth, almost to its destruction, but yet still intact, still powdery with the dirt through which some wretched digger had hoped to glimpse the shining substance that would alter his life.

VALENTINE REVISITED

The year had turned and the first signs of spring were visible in Chelsea.

Emmeline Adeane, with Jane at her side, was now wiping her hands on a turpentine-soaked rag and looking with satisfaction at Jane’s finished portrait.

The aspect which Emmeline had found for her niece’s face was one of severity, suggesting both a clever mind and perhaps even a stubborn one. But for a long while there had been something missing from the features, something the painting had not caught.

Emmeline had seen at last what this was. She had then reshaped Jane’s mouth very slightly, giving it an almost imperceptible upward curl on one side. The tiny alteration now suggested the humour and the fondness for irony which were so much a part of Jane’s nature, but which had been absent from the portrait until Emmeline had made this final adjustment.