She remembered her father standing her by the Mill sluice some years before and pointing out to her how all round the village the hills sloped down, sometimes gently as with the fields to Rockwell, sometimes steeply as with the woods above the Common. ‘If you’re ever lost, Marion,’ he had said, ‘lost in the forest, if you go down hill you will come to the village.’ He had also said something about the sun but she had forgotten what. Anyway it was a grim overcast October afternoon with no glimmer of sun even if she could have seen the sky above the thick canopy of trees. But down hill? On her left the ground did slope down but only into a little leaf-filled dip and rose again the other side. Great beech trees were everywhere with an undergrowth of bushes making it impossible to see far. With no hope in her heart she had rushed down into the dip and clambered up the rooty slope the other side. It seemed here that the forest extended level on all sides as far as she could see, which was not very far. She shrieked again, and on hearing the panic in her own voice, her terror increased. She ran ahead as fast as she could, then gasping for breath she paused, and suddenly the sweet, sweet smell of wood smoke came to her nose, the smell of the village, of home, the smell familiar to her from infancy. She stood trying to scent what direction it came from, and looking round saw that to her right the trees were thinning and the sky visible between their upper trunks. She ran on, fearing she might be approaching one of the many small clearings in the forest, but the smell persisted, giving her hope. She noticed as she ran that she was running down hill, even as she twisted this way and that between bushes. Then the beeches gave way to hazels and the hazels to an open view, and there far below her was the Mill, and further still the big oak on the Green partly hiding the Hall, and far away down the edge of the stubble field was the line of the other children slowly ambling towards the village. At the head of the line two boys walked one behind the other with a long branch over their left shoulders on which was slung the sack of beech mast, and all the other children followed, dragging dead branches behind them. It was a rule: never return from the forest without as much dry firewood as you can carry.

Marion shouted again and the last two in the line looked round and waved casually but did not pause. Marion realized she had not even been missed. She realized too she had been crying. She gulped and calmed herself. She saw she could follow the line of children a short distance and then branch off to go home to the Mill by herself, while the others went on to deliver their beech mast to the Hall. Her legs were trembling. She caught a foot in the unravelling edge of her skirt, tearing it more as she fell in the tussocky grass. She was not hurt and went on more soberly to the Mill. Her mother, tall and gaunt, was sitting on the ground near the door with a sieve half full of corn and chaff between her knees and a sack with dust and bits between her feet. She stirred the contents of the sieve in an absent-minded way.