Sydney shook her head. With both hands clasped on her lap she sat quite still, defeated. She could not look at Milton, who helped out Mrs Kerr and Tessa and walked with them up to the wagon. In a minute or two he was back. ‘I say, aren’t you coming?’

She shook her head again stonily.

‘Sydney … has this given you rather a shock?’

She was plainly what people describe as ‘upset’.

‘They’ve no right to bring those things up here,’ he angrily cried.

‘Well, they must build their houses, my dear.’ It was the tolerance of lassitude. She looked over the side of the car down into the valley: a kind of farewell. It was a long way below – the depth of it would never be forgotten.

‘Funny we shouldn’t have seen it ahead of us,’ said Milton, thinking about the wagon, ‘or underneath us. It’s the way the rocks stick out – pretty dangerous, I must say.’

She agreed. ‘Pretty dangerous. Look here, I will come; but go on with the others. I’ll just stay here a moment or two.’

They were having – up here – a later view of the sun than their friends down below; by now the tennis courts would be silent, the sea fading, the earliest lights coming out pale and exotic in hotels whose walls still had an afterglow. Here the sun was still full on the village, level on peak behind peak; the gold only gave way reluctantly to a mild rose that chilled and abated and was transfused by shadows mounting up like smoke out of the valley. This isolation above the regular approach of night connected itself in her mind with her present shocked sense of having been flung back on to living. The depths of shadow from which they were barred away would have been to her infinitely grateful. Above, in this unnatural, endless prolongation of the daylight she for the first time felt life sharply, life as keen as death to bite upon the consciousness, pressed inexorably upon her, held to her throat like a knife. Dazed by a realization of their import she stared at her hands, at her body, at the hills round her.

Later she had scrambled from the car and was running down the hill on her stiff legs unsteadily, calling to James.