‘No, look here, Sydney … why should we be afraid? It’s a way out for us both – can’t you see it so? – a way out of ourselves. Don’t you remember the boy – Curdie – in the fairy tale, who opened a door straight on to the sky and was told to walk through it? He didn’t like it all – naturally – there was just the sky there and some of the stars were under him. However, he went forward, and just found himself walking – he had no idea how. If we go straight ahead——’

‘I’d have gone back through the door. I’m not the stuff for a fairy tale. I’ve no faculty of wonder, James. Nothing is new to me.’

He didn’t like to say, ‘Do I offer you nothing, then?’ He found himself guilty of having supposed that he did. She was new to him in every aspect, in all that she was and meant. He could not imagine a time when he would not take a stranger’s pleasure in looking at her across a room. He could not imagine a time when her movements would be calculable to him, or when she would cease to reappear just as he had not expected from behind the veil of his thought.

‘I think you’re wrong there,’ he said gently. ‘After all, you haven’t lived so very long. You may be surprised——’

She interrupted him here, not by saying anything, but by an odd silence. Her face had a strained kind of stillness as though it might at any moment break up into tears. She tramped beside him doggedly, as though she were really very tired, along the rough track, ducking her head mechanically now and then to avoid the branches. She seemed so drawn away from him that he could not realize his arms had been round her a moment ago. He cried, ‘Sydney, you’re not happy!’ The exclamation was torn from him; he would have given much to recall it.

‘I tell you I am,’ she said obstinately and coldly; ‘if you’re happy, I’m happy.’ She managed to make him feel he had blustered at her, and he said with less warmth, ‘Oh, very well, my darling, I don’t want to bully you.’ He had never been in love before and he had never quarrelled with anybody. This, he supposed, was now (or would soon be) a ‘lovers’ quarrel’, coming with a too-obliging promptness to link up for him the two experiences. Was this, then, a glimpse of their composite temper – irrational, touchy and vain? He longed to ask her this – he believed her to be saner than he was. His face, bright with an incommunicable glow of speculation, suddenly angered her.