Round the wagon a tumult was raging of admonition, sympathy and abuse. Several young men had sprung up out of nowhere and were straining, shouting and heaving, alternately propping stones under the wheels of the wagon, then trying to push the wagon forward over the stones. Other young men and some women came scrambling down in a state of happy excitement by a precipitous path from the village that struck down direct across the zigzags of the road. Friends of the wagoner kicked the horses in the chest to make them back farther, tugged them forward by the bridles and almost incessantly beat them over the head. Sydney saw Milton, scarlet and also shouting, trying to stop this and being swept aside amicably as one who knew nothing of the country, of timber or the management of horses. Tessa, only too glad to be out of the Fiat, was trotting up and down like a little bear in her fur coat. No one, evidently, could have been sorrier for the poor horses than Mrs Kerr, but she was trying to restrain Milton from further interference because he ran a momentary danger of being elbowed over the edge of the road. As Sydney approached, the situation was further complicated by a short log working loose from the pile, slipping down sideways and getting locked between the far-apart spokes of the wheel.

‘It’s all so damned silly!’ cried Milton exasperatedly. The crisis brought out in him at the expense of his rationality all that was latently English. Mrs Kerr shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

‘One of those horses is bleeding,’ he added in helpless disgust.

‘Then come away,’ said Mrs Kerr. ‘After all, we’re not asked to more than imagine what animals suffer. We aren’t asked to be certain – it mayn’t be so bad. I think I’ll go back to the car.’

Milton only half understood what she said and did not hear Sydney calling him. His attention was all for the horses. ‘They ought at least,’ he exclaimed later on, ‘to have warned us up there in the village that this was ahead.’ He turned to find Sydney there, pale, at his elbow and Mrs Kerr gone.

‘Will they be long?’ she said anxiously. He nodded, and she put a hand on his arm and guided him up the road again, past the Fiat, where Tessa and Mrs Kerr were sitting again wrapped up in rugs. Sydney looked at them vacantly, turned to Milton to say something with the same air of vacancy, saw with alarm the car was still close behind them and hurried him on to get farther out of earshot. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘that it’s quite impossible.’

He understood by some odd intuition; but kept her watching him for a moment or two while he listened intently to the clamour below, the isolated exclamation, the voices. ‘What’s quite impossible, Sydney? What do you mean?’

‘Our marriage.’