‘What kept ourselves here?’ I asked myself a moment afterwards, mocking my own hope. We lighted a fire once again to dry our stockings. It was not yet near day. We ate the last of our meat. The interminable hours rode over us. We longed for day to come though we expected nothing from day but the knowledge that time indeed passed. Before the sun rose on the peak of the Farrow a string of deer came up from feeding all night in the wood. I killed a calf with a lucky shot. We wrapped its liver and the best of its ribs in moss and buried them in the embers of our fire to cook. We were ravenously hungry.

‘What are we going to do?’ Terry asked when we had eaten of that revolting mess of half-cooked meat.

‘Do?’ I echoed bitterly. ‘Wait, nothing but wait.’

‘Here where we are?’ she went on.

‘Oh, not here, nothing so comfortable and easy,’ I returned. ‘But in the thickest depths of that wood, skulking there—it’s time to go.’

We had scarcely penetrated the fringes of the wood when a rustling close by arrested us. Terry, behind me, cried out, ‘Hugh! lie down! a man with a gun!’

Upon her words the sound of a shot-gun crashed out and pellets, fired from too great a distance to harm us or else deflected by the branches of trees, pattered round us.