‘Hullo,’ she said calmly. ‘What are you huffing and puffing about? Did you get a load of beechnuts?’

‘Yes,’ said Marion, ‘a whole sackful.’

‘That’s not much with seven or eight collecting. What have you done to your skirt?’

‘I caught my foot in it and fell in the grass.’ Her mother examined the skirt in a desultory manner.

‘You’d better sew it up before dark this evening, it’ll only get worse if you leave it. Didn’t you bring any firewood?’

‘The others found firewood. They’re taking it all to the Hall with the sack.’

‘You might have found some too, you’d nothing else to carry,’ her mother grumbled, calmly, and the very ordinariness of her voice and sentiments dispersed further the terror in Marion’s mind. She resolved not to tell of her panic, and from that day she had never mentioned it.

Marion comforted Alice with hugs and a drink of goat’s milk, set her down by the cottage and herself dropped on to the log seat under the eaves. She wondered why she felt so particularly exhausted. Perhaps it was her hardly admitted anxiety; perhaps it was the thundery weather. The air was heavy with impending rain, yet none fell. It was very still. She looked down the weedy garden and the grassy path running between the beds. Some pods among the tangle of pea plants and their supports were ripe for picking, but not many, so it was no use tidying up that area until picking was complete. Then there would be a great pile of haulms to be taken to Molly’s pig shed for the autumn fattening of their jointly owned pig. But now the pea bed was sprinkled with groundsel, little yellow tassles and tiny beige tufts and clocks, stalks of feathery yarrow with their white discs of flowers stained pink in places, a few late poppies, and, upon the worn grass on the path, flat rosettes of plantain leaves, silvery potentillas and white clover, now browned and trampled.

The apple tree by the fence was, Marion noticed, bearing a good crop of apples, for as the growing apples paled, they became distinguishable among all the greener leaves. Thistles grew against the fence too, and as Marion sat there she watched, every now and then, a starry sphere float from the thistles across the garden.

Her thoughts were of the recent past – of Dick, of death, of change, of the feeble transiency of life. When she had gone that morning to the Shepherds’ cottage in her search for Alice, she had passed the open door, glanced in and, not seeing Lisa there, had gone down the garden and called to Lisa about Alice. She had been too anxious about Alice to register any feeling about the cottage, but now, sitting idly before the very familiar view of her own garden and the woods beyond, she recalled precisely the interior of the cottage which had been Dick and Hilda’s home.

It’s the same place, she thought, but all different. I will never again see his crook leaning against the wall by the door. The row of shears that he kept hanging along the edge of the shelf inside will never be there again.