When he turned back he saw that she had gone farther up the river-bed and was sitting in shade, close to the stream. She sat very still and it was impossible to guess at her mood from her posture. As he walked towards her, he wondered of what she thought. He saw her hands move up and pull off the black London hat. In a moment she turned her head and waved to him. When he reached her side he saw that she had been crying.

“Well,” said Alleyn, “how do you feel about lunch? They’ve given me a billy to make the authentic brew of tea—I thought you would insist on that, but if you’re not tourist-minded, there’s some sort of white wine. Anyway we’ll make a fire because it smells pleasant. Will you unpack the lunch while I attempt to do my great open spaces stuff with sticks and at least three boxes of matches?”

She could not answer, and he knew that at last the sprightly, vague, delightfully artificial Carolyn had failed her, and that she was left alone with herself and with him.

He turned away, but her voice recalled him.

“You won’t believe it,” she was saying. “Nobody will believe it—but I was so fond of my Alfie-pooh.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Duologue

ALLEYN DID NOT at once reply. He was thinking that by a sort of fluke he was about to reach a far deeper layer of Carolyn’s personality than was usually revealed. It was as though the top layers of whimsicality and charm and gaiety had become transparent and through them appeared—not perhaps the whole innermost Carolyn but at least a part of her. “And this because she is unhappy and I have jerked her away from her usual background and brought her to a place where the air is very clear and heady, and there is the sound of a mountain stream and the voice of a bird with a note like a little gong.”

Aloud he said:

“But I can believe it very easily. I thought you seemed fond of him.”

He began to break up a branch of dry driftwood.

“Not romantically in love with him,” continued Carolyn. “My poor fat Alfie! He was not a romantic husband, but he was so kind and understanding. He never minded whether I was amusing or dull. He thought it impossible that I could be dull. I didn’t have to bother about any of that.”

Alleyn laid his twigs between two flat stones and tucked a screw of paper under them.

“I know,” he said. “There are people to whom one need not show off. It’s a great comfort sometimes. I’ve got one of that kind.”

“Your wife! But I didn’t know—”