They look up. But then they go out briefly to buy food, and they imagine that all eyes are looking at them with suspicion, ill-will and coldness.

They hurry home again, where they are left completely to themselves. They cannot think of studying. Nobody comes to see them; the arrow polisher had no close relatives. They grow more and more passive in their abyss.

Hold up your heads, comes the call through the silence.

They hear it. Was it repeated?

They have to answer that they do not know how to.

All the same they listen with beating hearts to this calm, authoritative voice that does not cease to call them in order to free them from the bondage of their thoughts; to give them ground on which to stand once more.

Hold up your head, Frank, says the voice.

Hold up your head, Freda.

They listen to it as one listens to what one can never have but longs to hear about. The house is cracking around them. They are old enough to sense it, to feel the weight of it, to see the arrows that glisten, and which are now being made to shine by another man. The atmosphere in the house makes Frank and Freda throb and smart, but they are unable to free themselves from their own conflict, in which they are struggling alone. Free yourself, says the voice inside them. You are free.

It calls ceaselessly, this stubborn voice asking them to stand upright, and part of them wishes they could respond to it.

But we are in the abyss. And once you’re there….

There is a knock on the door and Frank calls ‘Come in!’ What does this mean? There’s nothing to come here for.

A man with a strangely white face is standing in the doorway. Frank and Freda believe they have seen him before, and heard about him in the whispered conversations they used to have with their friends. He used to be with Stig. At least they’ve heard so. He’s called Peter. And he has come here?

It shocks them to realize that this is one of the people who knew Stig. What does he want? Their guilt is such that they can scarcely look at him.

He is talking to them, and that makes them cringe too.

‘Don’t be scared, you two,’ he says. ‘I’m out on an errand and I just happened to be passing.’

They look up, questioningly. The blood returns slowly to their cheeks. Peter looks at them with an expression that they do not understand, but which attracts their attention and wins their confidence.

It occurs to them that he is not after them in any way. He has come to talk to them. He has come to do them an honour, it seems to them suddenly, as they wait to hear what he is going to say. And when he speaks, he says what they have heard already.

‘There’s no reason why you should feel guilt for what your father did, Frank,’ he says. ‘Nor you, Freda. But you know that yourselves.’