“But I am anxious to see them, John. It will not take you long.”

“You mean I should leave you here?”

“We are at the house now. I feel perfectly safe. And I have done enough for one day. I would like to rest. I need to.”

He looked up at her. It was suddenly obvious to him that she could not be expected to do any more. “Well,” he said. “I suppose. If you wish it. And if I do not find them I will turn around and come straight back.”

He asked if she would like her guittar for company. She said she would. He fetched it from its peg, dusted it with his sleeve and settled it in her lap.

“It will need tuning,” she said, her left hand already sliding up the instrument’s neck towards the brass box and the little key.

He went out. He looked at the horse then decided to walk. He could stride now, unencumbered by luggage, by a woman in a blindfold. He thought, my sword hand is free, then thought of his sword left lying in a room in Spain, and of the fact that there was not even a branch of wood on the island he could use in its place. After a few minutes he halted to look back at the house. He fancied he could hear the guittar but knew he could not, not really. What could he hear? Birds. The sea. The sea perhaps. That too he might be imagining.

He went on. The air had a scent, a herbal sweetness, his own walking gave rise to. Heather, wild thyme, clover. But how open it was here! No hiding place for anything bigger than a lapwing. He was, he realised—had been since that moment on the ride down to the house—moving in two realities at once. In the first, everything was perfectly ordinary and just as it appeared, the island as he had come to it in the beginning. In the other, he had to resume the habits of active service, the scanning and reading of the land, the making and remaking of schemes with which to meet what could only be guessed at. If he had poor Ruffian under him! A man on a cavalry horse is a powerful man. On foot he is nothing but himself, the bare creature, unresourced. And into his mind came the face, the scarred arms, of the gunsmith in Bristol, his quip about infantry officers always trying to see over the top of something. He remembered it but it did not make him smile.