‘Oh!’ he said quietly. ‘Oh!’

‘I don’t know how we could ever have thought of it.’

‘I’m afraid,’ he said slowly, ‘I can’t see yet why it’s not right.’

She looked hopeless. ‘I suppose I can’t make you see. But I do know.’

‘Since when?’ She seemed protected by some kind of exaltation, so he let out his pain in sarcasm. ‘Recently, Sydney?’

‘Just now. I suppose it was the shock of being alive – oh, how can I explain to you? I had had no idea we were as real as this. I’d never realized it mattered so much … Oh, my dear, no, don’t touch me. Come farther–come round the bend of the road.’

‘I wasn’t going to touch you,’ he said, ashamed for both of them, half aware that an instinctive movement towards her must have been exaggerated by the effect of distance she gave him. By some defect of focus he had seen her as a long way away. They went up the hill painfully, as though it were steeper, and turned the next corner, which gave her back a kind of echo, a ghost of that early idea of deliverance. Farther up she sat down on a bank by the side of the road; because she looked tired enough to fall sideways he sat down close to her, put an arm round her and propped her up against a brotherly shoulder. ‘Now tell me,’ he said, ‘if you feel you can tell me.’

‘Now I understand – but it seems as if I ought to tell you what I didn’t understand. I think we have been asleep here; you know in a dream how quickly and lightly shapes move, they have no weight, nothing offers them any resistance. They are governed by some funny law of convenience that seems to us perfectly rational, they clash together without any noise and come apart without injury.’

‘Do you think we’ve been ruled by this “funny law of convenience”?’

‘Yes,’ she said without hesitation, but putting a hand out as though to propitiate him. ‘We have taken nothing into account. You and me – how could we ever have thought of it? It was just a dream. It seemed simple.’

‘It never seemed simple to me. I was going to fight every inch of it.’

‘But you’re not ——’ she began, broke off, and in a manner at once intimate and very impersonal leaned closer against his shoulder.

‘Not what?’ he said urging this out of her.

‘Not a fighter.’

‘Not a born fighter, perhaps … I thought we could help each other.’

‘Never. You could never have thought that.’

‘If I am to let you go I shall have to learn to say “Never”.’

‘Say it now – or shall I have to tell you everything?’

‘I would rather you did. But no; the laws of convenience. I think I could guess what is coming … Sydney?’