‘But she isn’t allowed to run about the town by herself,’ said Sydney, vexed, ‘and she certainly isn’t allowed to eat between meals – she’s very much be-Nannied. Whatever made you do that?’

‘She’s not the sort of child to get talked to, and I’m sure she has an inside like an ostrich. If her people encourage her to attach herself to strangers like that, they’ll have to take the consequences. I sent her off because she’s been the most infernal nuisance all the morning.’ He was crimson.

‘You feel strongly about it,’ said Sydney, laughing at him, bathed in sunshine and forgetful of perils to Cordelia. ‘Moral indignation?’

He did not interrupt her, but something in his silence, his arrested consciousness of the gap Cordelia’s disappearance left between them and the clear view they had of each other, made her interrupt herself.

‘I’m sorry she has bored you,’ she said nervously. ‘I really ought not to have brought her.’

‘No, I don’t think you ought. I asked you to come for a walk; I didn’t ask you to collect an expedition.’

‘Well, you see ——’ she began, then stopped again. Their conspicuous if isolated situation, the matter-of-fact sunshine and the sense that with all said and done they were English Visitors, he and she, sitting appropriately on a bench before a view designed for their admiration, had up to now kept her purely impersonal. So objective did she feel that she imagined a delighted Commune gazing down at the two of them: ‘English Visitors.’ In the expansion of the free air she had laughed and felt that neither of them were realler than the scenery. Now, at some tone in his voice she was surprised by a feeling that some new mood, not of her own, was coming down over them like a bell-glass. The bright reality of the view, the consciousness of the unimportant, safe little figures were shut away from her; they were always there but could no longer help. She felt the bell-glass finally descend as he, after a glance round at the other benches and over the edge of the plateau, said quickly, ‘The thing is, Sydney, aren’t I ever to know you?’

‘I don’t see what you mean,’ she said, suffocated by his manner. ‘Like everybody else, we see each other every day. Which was what, according to you, we are here for.’