She did not answer. He saw her hand stealing up to her face and discovered that tears were coming out from under her eyelids, and that she was trying to brush them away with the tip of a finger. ‘I haven’t got a handkerchief,’ she said as she felt him detect this. ‘I left it behind in the car.’ He managed with an arm round her, shifting his position gently so as not to disturb her, to extract a clean handkerchief that he had pushed up his cuff.

‘Thank you,’ she said, crumpling up the handkerchief and staring at it. ‘You are – you are – comfortable.’

‘So they tell me,’ said he, and his mouth twisted in momentary bitter repudiation of comfortableness.

‘I’d rather do this alone, if you don’t mind,’ she said, as the tears began to come faster.

‘Very well – shall I walk up and down or will you?’

As she did not answer and did not stir he got up and left her. Patrolling their bit of the road at absent speed, with his hands in his pockets, he could still feel her hand heavy on his shoulder, and the feeling of intimacy and nearness remained with him. He remembered, looking back with pity for them both, that questioning long look in which they had been baffled by one another under the olive trees. At this moment of swinging apart he was one with her, and was able to say, ‘she is right’. Passing by her again and again where she sat he looked or did not look: either seemed to be natural. He could feel rather than perceive her there sitting upright, her hands on her knees, his handkerchief a dead-white blot in the dark. The tide of shadow had risen at last and engulfed them, drawing the hills together and making the valley seem to float up to them, spreading a film of silence in which the clamour from below was diffused. The last of the pink light faded slowly from the hills; the moon rose opaque and lustreless in the still lucent sky.

‘Don’t come till you’re ready,’ he called as he saw her getting up slowly.

‘I’m ready now,’ she said, coming towards him.

His admission was ready for her. ‘I do see what you mean,’ he said. ‘I do understand.’

‘Is there anything queer about my eyes – would one notice?’ she asked, and turned her face up to his anxiously. He had to peer close in the half-light before he assured her. ‘No; nobody’d guess.’

They turned and walked silently back to the car. Tessa was sitting round looking out eagerly for them over the back.

‘They’ve had an idea,’ she cried: ‘they’re going to saw off that long bit of timber. Our driver says it was his idea. One of the men is fetching a saw.’