‘Yes. We were talking about something that was impossible as if it were possible and it was because you were mad in that way that you were mad in the other. We were not thinking clearly. We were not feeling clearly.’

‘I can’t accept that. Perhaps because I was preoccupied in thinking about us I didn’t give enough thought to what I was allowing to happen with Gilbert. That’s the most I will allow.’

‘We were allowing ourselves to think extravagances. We were not testing them against reality.’

‘It was not an extravagance. It was true.’

‘It was a dream.’

‘I will always dream it.’

‘But we have to live in the real world, a world with other people in it, not a dream world, with only us.’

He felt an extraordinary heaviness of heart. It was not that he was going to give up, so much as that he foresaw he might not succeed.

As they approached the lodge gates he said doggedly, ‘But it is true that we love each other?’

‘Yes, it is true that we love each other.’

‘Then I shan’t say another word.’

He took her arm in his and they walked the whole length of the drive in silence, between the elms which from time to time let fall a yellowed leaf from their almost bare branches, and past the clumps of beeches and the view towards the lake, and between the fences of post and rail and through the gate beside the cattle grid, and past the black-horned sheep grazing concentratedly on the short smooth turf in front of the ha-ha which divided the Park from the garden.

Glass was talking to Walter Weir, holding out to him his own hard hat (his balding head clean and exposed – it was seldom uncovered) and telling him to take it to the river with any others he could find that would serve the purpose and fill them with water. Cicely noticed two men carrying guns and cartridge bags hovering undecidedly behind him as if they wondered whether they too should fetch water. Percy Maidment and Albert Jarvis had not spoken to each other since the accident and neither was anxious to meet the other’s eye.

‘You’d best go on home if you don’t mind,’ Glass said to them. ‘Sir Randolph wants everyone to go on home.’

They nodded and set off across the field, but being both puzzled as to what to think about the outcome of a contest into which they had thrown themselves with such passion, they felt no wish to enter into conversation. Percy gradually fell behind. Albert strode on ahead, the more solid of the two. Percy, an undersized wisp of a man, followed in dejection; the day was ruined, as far as he was concerned. His man had won, had beaten the champion; but who was going to remember that now?