To this haunted pool, with its girdle of beech trees, on which Joanna knew every foothold and every untrustworthy branch, she stole that morning. Lying concealed among the drenched reeds of the margin, she waited until the disturbed coots and waterhens went reassured about their interminable business. For what seemed an age she stayed motionless, listening intently to each tiny splashing and diving, to the whisperings among the bearded rushes, to the sudden plump of the frogs, to the chuckling of the water-fowl under the banks.

At that moment the twelve-year-old child entered deeply into Nature’s heart, and for the first time it came to her that she might make of her rapture a place of retreat for future days. It was a discovery. Henceforth she felt that nothing, no one, would have power to harm her. For all her life now she would have within herself this hidden refuge. Even if she were to be burned at the stake, or flayed alive like the people in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, she would be able to fly in spirit from her torturers to this reedy water; and they would wonder why she smiled amid the flames.

So she lay on till she was bodiless; and only the cold, penetrating through her clothes to her skin, reminded her. She moved, and only in moving realized that she was wet through and cramped. Her stirring startled the old heron. He rose noisily, first trailing his feet a little way along the surface of the tarn, then made away westwards till he became a far speck over the hollow where the nearest farm lay.

Stretching herself and shaking the water from her hair, Joanna felt glad at the thought of breakfast. It was good that the others were waiting at home, sitting at a table spread with the floury baps that came each morning fresh-baked from the village; and coffee, and bramble jam, and fresh butter, which she loved to greediness, from their own cow’s cream. But before turning homeward between the beech trunks, she stooped once more to the ground, and leaning on her two palms kissed the moist grass till the taste of the earth was on her lips. “If I forget thee, O Duntarvie,” she whispered, “let my right hand forget its cunning.” (She was not clear about the meaning of this phrase; but she loved working with her hands, and the words expressed her emotion better than any other words she knew.) Then she picked up some odds and ends – a small lichen-covered twig, a skeleton leaf, and the untimely fallen samara of a sycamore – to keep as remembrancers of her vow, and racing back to the house she arrived in a glow, bright-cheeked, her short skirts dripping from the brackens.

V

Mingled with these raptures were the early stirrings of Joanna’s womanhood, and at seven she had fallen deeply in love with her cousin Gerald Bird, who was then twenty-five.