‘Thought of what?’ she asked curiously, regarding my joyful antics without enthusiasm. ‘Do you mean a hammock, Hugh? Where could we sling it? Wouldn’t it be in our way equally with a bed on the floor?’

I refused to tell her what my plan was, though she implored me to divulge it.

‘It mightn’t be a success,’ I put her off. Of course, if I had not been fairly certain of its success I should have let her into the secret, and avoided the danger of solitary discomfiture.

Leaving her to work in the cave, I went to the birch wood beside Loch Coulter with the heavy axe and cut down and trimmed six good straight young birch trees. When I had fetched them to the cave I took measurements of the distances from the outer edge of the floor and from the inner edge to the peak of the roof; I took these measurements inside the cave close by the fireplace, four feet from the fireplace, and ten feet from the fireplace. I cut the poles, one for each measurement, but every pole three inches or thereby longer than the measurement, and I made holes in the floor at the places where I had taken the measurements. I now carried the poles into the cave and set them up in the places I had measured for them, with their butt ends in the holes in the floor and their points just crossing underneath the roof. I lashed each pair together where they crossed so that I had as it were three pairs of rafters. As soon as this was done I returned to the wood and found a slender birch tree from which I cut a straight ten-foot length. I searched again for rowan saplings about two inches thick; I collected six of these and they were likewise ten feet long.

When these in turn were brought to the cave I packed the holes in the floor with small stones and tamped the stones with clay and pounded it until the rafters were as firm at the base as I could make them. Thereafter I slipped the ten-foot birch along the roof until the end touched the chimney-wall. It rested safely in the crutch of the three crossed rafters, and I lashed it there. The rowan saplings were likewise tied to the rafters at equal distances down the sides of the cave; I had a framework ready for my plan.

Terry watched me with an expression half-curious, half- rebellious, on her face.

‘It’s not fair, Hugh,’ she cried out at length, ‘you ought to tell me what you are doing. Anyway,’ she concluded illogically, ‘I don’t believe you know yourself, unless you think the roof is about to fall, and how am I to cook with that cat’s cradle dangling over my head?’