‘Hugh,’ she said in low tones. ‘It wasn’t merely to escape from war and conscription we came here, not to avoid mere facts like murder and outrage and poison gas.’

‘What then?’ I inquired. ‘Was it self-begotten fears that chased us? Were we so cowardly?’

‘Out of the world that uses such means and thinks such thoughts,’ she said, ‘out from amongst men who hate each other—’

‘Fleeing from the wrath to come,’ I quoted mockingly. ‘Discreet but not valiant. So we’re tuppenny evangelists awaiting the dawn of peace, hey?’

‘Fleeing from the wrath that is,’ she said.

‘And all the captains and all the kings and all the great men shall hide themselves,’ I rattled on. ‘We’ve certainly rocks enough to call down on our heads, Terry. The new Armageddon.’

‘Hugh!’ she pleaded.

‘Terry!’ I returned defensively.

‘And if there’s no war, and all’s peaceful,’ she said, composing herself, ‘we’ll go back to our house.’

I looked at her without speaking.

‘And stand on the lip of hell,’ she went on drearily, ‘waiting for whispers, waiting for war, war more horrible the longer it’s delayed.’

‘No,’ I said in a low voice. ‘So here we sit till the millennium,’ I said a moment later. ‘What if it comes in winter time, Terry, and we can’t get down for storm, like old Macdonald of Glencoe in his day of pacification, or we can’t hear the sound of the call when the Prince of Peace sounds his rally for the noise of wind and storm?’

‘I think we should be making ready,’ she said in a breaking voice. Then she cried, ‘Hugh! Hugh! it rends my heart to hear you mocking and bitter.’

‘Does it gladden my own?’ I asked. I could say nothing to comfort her. I stood staring at the ground like one transfixed by the shafts of despair while she went silently away to put on her shoes for the journey.

We prepared for the going with mechanical care. I took our ammunition from the cave and hid it in a cleft of the rock. I cleaned the lenses of my telescope and set out the .22 and slipped the bolt of the .303 into my pocket. If we returned to find an intruder I had rather not meet him armed with our own weapon.