Actually one wet afternoon it had looked to her as if her fantastic wish might come true. She and Gerald were in the coachhouse, where the stanhope and dogcart were kept among a litter of odds and ends – gardening tools, empty flower-pots, wheelbarrows, and rolls of wire netting for the chicken runs which Sholto was always making – and for perhaps half-an-hour she had been watching in rapt silence while a pearly-breasted chaffinch was stuffed and sewed up. But, suddenly tired of his finicking task, Gerald threw down his work and stretched his arms above his head with a groan. He was sitting on the worn bench by the door, with his back to the dripping eaves, and presently to amuse himself he drew Joanna between his knees. Smiling, he pointed his pen-knife that was still blood-stained against the child’s breast, almost cutting through the wool of her faded, tightly stretched jersey, and he threatened to skin her like a little wild bird. To his surprise – for he expected her to wriggle or protest – Joanna stood dumb and quite still and strange in his grip. So he soon stopped teasing her. But he had provided her with a theme which she afterwards embroidered out of all recognition in many an erotic rhapsody.

Joanna admired everything about her cousin. She idolized his brown face and bright grey piercing gaze, vibrated at the sight of his hands, and at any time, night or day, could see with her mind’s eye the wave with which his hair crossed his brow. She had tried hard to make her own hair lie like his; but where the line of growth began round her forehead there was what Georgie called her “baby fringe,” and this crop of short new hairs, fairer than the rest, would do nothing but curve downwards in obstinate, fine half-hoops of gold.

There was, however, one secret about Gerald which terrified while it fascinated her.

It happened one afternoon that, climbing about the old sawmill he slipped and hurt his foot. Some stones in the crumbling walls had given way, and when he picked himself up he limped with a screwed-up face to the burn that flowed from under the ruin. Joanna was there in the boggy field picking marsh-mallows and some reeds to make a rattle and Gerald sat down on the bank near her. Already his foot was beginning to swell, and he wanted to dip it in the water. Joanna stood beside him clutching her heavy-headed yellow flowers, and the beards and sharp points of the reeds tickled her chin. She watched the young man take off his shoe with a grimace, and peel the sock from the bruised ankle. And as he rolled back the grey flannel of his trousers half-way to the knee she saw with a pang of delicious horror that his leg was hairy. From the ankle upwards it was covered with black silky hairs that clung to the gleaming skin.