‘Oh, it was the drizzle that got on my nerves!’ I said. ‘If rain comes down properly I like it. It’s fine to see the burns get up and hear them roar; I love to stand at the door watching the spates come over the rocks as white as snow. Something’s happening when it comes a flood and the wilder it is the surer you know that it’s got to end some time. If you stay inside how warm and dry and comfortable you are, and if you go out, then you get soaked and that’s all. But this drizzle, this mist, this clamminess that’s neither wet nor dry nor properly cold nor warm, it’s not enough to make you bide indoors, and when you go out it seeps and creeps until you’re wet and cold and miserable to the very marrow of your bones. You can’t see, you can’t think—I like wild weather—’

‘Yes,’ was all she said.

‘It’s terrible to let a little mist get the better of me,’ I went on ruefully.

‘We are very close to the weather here, Hugh,’ she said.

‘Imagine it, we were pleased to see the rain—’ I began.

‘I’m quite pleased it came,’ she interrupted. ‘It taught us lessons we were sadly needing.’

‘I suppose it did,’ I assented grudgingly, and then, suspicious of her meaning, I demanded, ‘What did it teach us, Terry?’

‘You know quite well,’ she returned. ‘The only way we learn things, Hugh, is by feeling them, suffering them. If we had all good weather and every day sunny until winter arrived we’d never discover how to keep our clothes dry, or make use of a fine interval—or avoid knocking against each other.’

‘A damned expensive way of learning,’ I grumbled. ‘My peats will be as wet as muck.’

‘Didn’t you make them into heaps?’

‘Yes, but that wouldn’t save them.’

‘You can’t tell until you’ve seen them. What’s the use of meeting trouble, Hugh? If they’re wet they’ll dry. We can cut more. A few hot days will cure all the harm that’s been done. But if we had no bad weather till winter, we’d see our stuff being spoilt then, without any hope of heat and sun to mend it.

‘And our cave is really fit for living in,’ she added.