‘My shepherdess!’ she said in surprised tones.

‘Terry!’ I cried. I was distracted, scarcely knowing what I did.

‘What’s the matter, Hugh?’ she asked in the same astonished voice. ‘Come, it’ll soon be day, we must go, have you the rifle?’

‘Terry!’ I said, catching her by the arms, ‘Terry! what’s the matter with you?’

‘You’re hurting me,’ she complained. ‘Let go my arm, Hugh.’

I could dimly perceive her pinched features in the June darkness. She struggled to be free, but I held her still.

‘You’re hurting me,’ she said angrily a second time. A moment later her voice fell to a childish complaint, ‘Oh, my head!’ She gave up struggling and began to sob. I held her in my arms with her face close to me. The wild-briar on our wall, broken though its branches were, made a faint sweet familiar smell. Soon she fell from sobbing to tears, and then she murmured, ‘I’m sleepy, Hugh, oh, so sleepy; take me home, Hugh.’

We returned to our cave, walking all day without attempting to hide. Terry was asleep on her feet long before we reached the cave. Helping her occupied me. Sometimes I carried her over miry ground and rocks and burns. I staggered to and fro like a drunk man. I could scarcely waken her when I laid her down.

So we came home. We lay down to sleep, but I could not sleep. I rose at dusk to make a meal for Terry and myself. She wakened too, her face all swollen with tears. I can hear her in the cave behind me, cooking and cleaning as I write.

I have no tears. My eyes are dry. Oh, Terry, Terry, our walls are broken and the garden spoiled.

Memory has no surcease. Each battered trinket on the filthy floor confronts me. This longest day will never end.

5 JULY

IT IS THE FIFTH of July. In an hour or so we shall have spent three full months here.

‘It doesn’t seem like months,’ Terry said when I reminded her of the date of our coming.

‘It scarcely feels like time at all,’ I agreed. I had a momentary vision of our tiny figures struggling under their load across the moor in that April night.

‘The nights are beginning to draw in,’ Terry went on. ‘I can see a difference in the light already, Hugh.’

‘Yes,’ I said with a sigh, ‘the year’s going downhill now; we must attend to our firewood though the weather is so hot. Soon it’ll be autumn; we can’t count on dry weather after August. And then winter—I hate the turn in the day, Terry. June’s so fine—’

‘No horse-flies and no thunder,’ she assented with a smile. ‘Those brutes of clegs! I’m all swollen with their bites!’