‘Great use, if we do it to help other folk, Hugh. We’ve fed while they starved, we’ve slept when they wandered distracted with fear.’

‘Help other folk!’ I laughed. ‘Great help we can give! grand helpers we! Assisting others when we can’t save ourselves. We’ve had to go without food too, Terry, and wander distracted with fear. Who’ll help us?’

‘Ourselves, when we help others. We helped him.’ She pointed to the still figure in the hammock.

‘Aye, and how were we met? Will others aim as badly as he did?’

‘It’s a chance we’ve got to take.’

‘Not chance but certainty. Why? To keep the dying flame of life flickering for a few painful extra moments?’

Colour came into her cheeks and her eyes began to sparkle.

‘Are you bent on saying things to hurt me?’ she cried. ‘Should we have left this creature, this fellow mortal, there, alone? You’re not quarrelling with me, Hugh, but with yourself, you’re saying things you don’t believe.’

‘Tell me how to say what I believe when I don’t know what it is!’ I exclaimed. ‘Then we should have stayed, we should never have come here.’

‘We had to come,’ she answered gravely. ‘Nothing else would have taught us—this.’ Her eyes went to our dying guest.

‘Dear, dear lesson!’ I muttered.

‘All that’s worth learning is dearly paid for,’ she said.

I went to the mouth of the cave to regard the scene we must forsake. I sat there like a stone for a long time. The stable edifice of our life was collapsing, and like one bewildered by the untimely stroke of chance that wrecks all I could not see a way or light or plan. Our habit of life must alter, to what shape I could not guess. Our stay was ended. Yet as I watched the hills, the shattered custom of our life began to form itself anew. If this hour ended a season of our lives, then it made complete that which it finished; with this regard our life, spent in this place, grew whole and rounded before my eyes.

‘We can’t carry all our stuff with us,’ I said a long time later.

‘We must choose what we need most,’ Terry said. ‘The rest will be safe here; we can come for it if we have use for it.’