Milton had woken up this morning with the determination to take Sydney for a walk. Nothing, in that moment of lucidity, had seemed simpler to arrange, and nothing could actually have been simpler, as things had turned out. He knew as well as she did, and would have been prepared to admit to her, that the time they had spent together up to now had been profitless and left them both sore. But he was convinced (the conviction emerged with what now seemed inevitability from the confusion and ill-spent emotion of last night) that a need corresponding to his must exist in her somewhere. A need, perhaps, less of each other exclusively than of something only attainable jointly, of something rooted in both. ‘But I do not know how to begin,’ he had complained to himself till this morning. Now he felt a mastery of the situation to be possible. ‘If I could only make her understand,’ he thought, ‘there would be time enough for her to care for me.’ At any rate, here they were walking together. The presence of this confounded little girl he chose to discount.

He turned, however, to talk to Cordelia kindly. They had chosen a road above the town for the sake of the view, and meant to drop down through the fishermen’s quarters and come home by the sea. Cordelia begged that she might be allowed to visit the graveyard. Milton observed conventionally that her taste seemed a little bit morbid.

‘Oh no, Mr Milton; you really ought to see the graveyard here; it’s most uncommon and beautifully decorated. I suppose as a clergyman you’ve had so much experience of them that you get out of the way of noticing, but I am sure you’d be struck by the one here. It’s most blood-curdling.’

‘If you like that sort of thing,’ said Milton in the somewhat top-heavy manner in which he could not help talking to children, ‘you should get your mother to take you to the Campo Santo at Pisa.’ Cordelia evidently suspected from his tone that he did not think her taste sufficiently elevated, while Sydney remarked parenthetically that she did not see Mrs Barry taking her children to Pisa.