‘I can’t think. I cut out lunch and came up here this morning because I had a headache, and I left word that I’d be here if he cared to come up afterwards. I said the third valley to the right, behind the convent. He may have miscounted. Or he may not want to come.’

‘But he must want to. After all, it would be only reasonable.’

‘You mean, consistently un reasonable?’

‘No, if I were in love at all I should expect to be with you all day,’ said Ronald masterfully.

‘Ah, to be in love at all’s the initial mistake!’

‘More, really, of a misapprehension.’

While Ronald talked she often had a giddy sense of watching all she had ever said being wound off from a spool backwards. Now and then came a truth that she had let slip away; she received this last one back again ice-cold. It went too deep and she wasn’t grateful to Ronald.

‘Well, don’t you, my dear Ronald, ever misapprehend!’

‘And don’t you be maternal!’

Catching some idea of a sound or a voice from one another they began to listen, as though the very mention of Milton’s name must have cast out a line to his consciousness and be drawing him up the valley towards them. For a moment or two they felt he was to appear immediately. Sydney leant forward expectantly, but nobody came into sight at the turn of the valley. She felt cold, and bitterly reproached herself for not having turned to smile sooner when she had been so sure she heard him coming before, when it had only been Ronald. She did not look at her watch, but knew that she had reached that psychological moment, that turning-point of any long wait when the likelihood of a friend’s arrival instead of increasing with the advance of time begins to diminish. She feared that through some intervention of a too far-seeing Providence on Milton’s behalf she might never see him again. She prayed that this might not be so: she felt sure that she loved him. Ronald, half aware of all this, felt a long way away from her, and began to wonder whether after all from the first he had not intruded.

He said (to observe the effect), ‘I’ll be going, I think. I may meet him – I’ll hurry him on. Anyhow, he wouldn’t want to find me here.’

The effect was a panic. ‘No, don’t, please don’t go,’ she exclaimed. ‘I can’t bear this valley alone: it’s so empty.’

‘You might have noticed that before,’ he observed, warming in spite of himself at this display of femininity. ‘Nervy?’

‘Yes, nervy,’ she agreed with a little boy’s grin.