‘I’ll wash,’ declared Veronica, and suddenly, incredibly, outrageously she gripped Victor’s hand, hoisted herself up by it and walked away with Victor down the hill. She left a gap across which the others looked at one another, and which they felt unable to draw up and fill. Mrs Lee-Mittison wished that they would all go away now, for a moment; she wanted to move up closer and sit next to Herbert. There was an uncertain silence. Then James Milton, who had been subject all his life to a kind of idiocy of nervousness, burst out laughing. The horrid sound which he could not contain appalled him, till at last to cover it he said to Mrs Lee-Mittison, ‘Youth calls to youth, doesn’t it?’ She replied, ‘I’m afraid I do not understand you.’ They all stared, Sydney with such contempt that her face remained imprinted burningly upon his memory. Presently, intending no offence but entirely forgetting that the story was to be continued, she also got up and strolled round the hill. She wanted to enjoy her own thoughts, which seemed all day to have been ceaselessly interrupted.

Veronica and Victor scrambled very companionably down towards the tank. The descent was in places almost precipitous; they had to lower themselves from tuft to tuft of grass. Once, coming to an empty slope, they lay and rolled down it; at another point they sat and slid. When trees interposed, they swung themselves joyously, like young apes, from trunk to trunk. Every now and then they reappeared into sight of those above, who, never ceasing to be aware of them, watched with covert but passionate interest. Their indifference, their recklessness, stirred something in the beholders, either envy or anger. At last, almost simultaneously, they leapt, with a dual cry just audible to their friends, into the soft tilled earth of a peasant’s garden. The little terrace projected like a shelf, like an apron-stage, over the depths of the valley. Here was Victor’s tank, round which, forgetting to wash, they soon began a most delectable water-battle.

‘Look,’ cried one of the Bransomes irrepressibly, ‘they’re splashing each other with water.’ The rest remained perfectly blank; Mrs Lee-Mittison knitted.