He left the tree and started at a good pace up the valley. A stone which somebody might have thrown came bounding down from the heights and struck the river bed; later a couple of goats, following one another across an almost perpendicular piece of hill, looked down at him sardonically. ‘So much for you,’ they intimated, and blinked their onyx eyes. Presently he met Sydney and Ronald coming to meet him at a swinging pace down the river bed. They were so deep in conversation and were making such a noise among the stones that for a minute or two they neither heard nor noticed him. Ronald was flushed and looked interested; the inequalities of the ground shook his words, which came at a great rate, out of him, and kept the lock of hair flopping up and down on his forehead. His arms swung loose, and were flung out sideways occasionally to help maintain, when a stone rolled sharply from under him, a precarious balance. Milton noticed that the two were like each other; they had the same build and the same carriage and might have been brother and sister – to, he believed, the advantage of both. He realized that this was the first time he had ever seen them together. It would be the last time, also, perhaps. They had been foredoomed in the very nature of things to miss one another. Biting a lip he looked back – had he been instrumental? There was pathos for him in this ghost of a contact, well-timed in this drained-out, colourless ghost of a day. Angrily, with a sense of destruction, he put up his hands and shouted.

Sydney started, her lit-up face turned vividly towards him, and she waved her walking-stick, then came hurrying down the river bed, springing for speed’s sake from boulder to boulder clear of the loose stones. ‘Slacker!’ she exclaimed. ‘Rotter, James!’ Her soft hatbrim flapped back in the wind of her motion, the ends of her bright scarf fled through the air behind her. She was radiant and boisterous. Ronald, who had been making a good point, remained in mid-stream behind her, shutting his mouth reluctantly.

‘Where have you been?’ she cried breathlessly. ‘If I’d the slightest grain of proper female pride I shouldn’t look at you … I told Ronald hours ago that you’d be coming any minute; that if you didn’t mountains would have slid on you. And here we find you hardly even hurrying!’ She scrambled up the bank and took his arm.

‘I had no idea – I didn’t mean to delay.’