‘It’s all so silly,’ she said, tall and thin in her black hat and coat, hurrying along the river bank. She wanted to be able to tell him just to drop it, to be like he’d always been. A girl didn’t want to be died for, all because of a lot of stuff about Beauty and Truth. No one could really think like that, it wasn’t serious. It wasn’t real.

‘It’s a lot of nonsense,’ she said frowning with the effort to be honest. ‘That’s what it is, a lot of bloody nonsense.’

She seldom swore, tho’ she heard other people do it often enough. Her mother would have been very angry if she had heard her. That was perhaps one reason why she now found herself wanting to cry, that and the intense annoyance she felt. Why couldn’t John stay as he was, why wasn’t life as romantic as his letter, why did she have to have this tiresome way of noticing when something was so much tripe?

She had crossed the water meadow and come to the edge of the wood. With a hand already on the stile which she would have to cross to follow the path through the wood, she saw Osbert ahead of her, and paused. He had not seen her. He was holding a long strand of bindweed, and passing it in a desultory way through his fingers, walking slowly from side to side of the path in the sun-dappled shadow of the beech trees. He was talking to himself in a disconnected drone. She held her breath, watching him as she would have watched a wild animal in such a place, only that a wild animal would not have aroused in her on its behalf such a feeling of extraordinary anxiety.

‘Hullo!’ He saw her and smiled. ‘I haven’t found the duck.’

‘I’ve come to help you. There’s a pair up here but I don’t know if it’s her.’

‘I think I’ve seen them. It’s not her. But we could have another look, in case.’

A distant volley of shots made them look at each other.

‘That’s right the other side of the woods,’ said Ellen. ‘They’ve got a long way to go yet.’

‘We’d better hurry though.’

‘We’ll find her, don’t you worry.’

She waited for him to cross the stile, then grasping her skirt again led the way back towards the river.

It was colder now. Though the sun was still shining there was not much warmth in it and the shadows were longer, the light more oblique than ever through the trees and on the Old Man’s Beard which climbed to a great height over the hawthorn and hazel on the edge of the next plantation.

‘I wish it was teatime,’ said Cicely, turning up the velvet collar of her tweed coat.

‘Already?’ said Tibor. ‘There’s hours to go yet. Where are your sporting instincts?’

‘In abeyance.’

‘You can’t be hungry, so soon after lunch. It’s my company that bores you, I know. In that case I shall have to shoot myself and I don’t want to do that at all. What an awful nuisance.’