‘It was sore, sore for a while,’ she murmured. ‘Our poor house—it did us good to see it though it hurt, Hugh.’

‘It brought us to earth,’ I asserted grimly. ‘It taught us that our game was earnest. We were like children playing at a picnic.’

‘Oh, it did more, far more than that, Hugh,’ she said.

We were dead beat when we reached the cave after our journey. We slept uneasy hours and wakened more tired than when we lay down. Our bones ached, our minds were drunk with fatigue, we moved in a stupor.

Everything I did was wrong and clumsy. When I reached out my hand to lift a pot or a cup I fumbled, and my nerves were on edge expecting the thing I caught to fall from my grasp and break. The least hindrance put me in a rage, and from sudden temper I fell into silence whose outward appearance was surly, whose inward cause and accompaniment was misery. Terry moved through the cave like a ghost, wan and silent and apprehensive-eyed. I would have given the world to be able to speak, to comfort her and unburden my own trouble. I was spell-bound to silence and the best I could fashion my lips to say was, ‘We must count our stores. It’s past time we estimated how long we can live on them.’

I laid out our hoard of boxes and parcels in the middle of the cave and Terry reckoned how much they held and how long the essential things like flour and salt would last us. We began by setting aside the stuff of which we had sufficient to last an indefinite time. The future was so uncertain and overclouded that a year ahead seemed like old age to youth, a fabulous distance away.

Our ammunition came first in this category. If I kept on using it as carefully as I had in the past, I could not conceive an end to it; I suppose we were desperately avoiding thought of the far future. If we planned years ahead, we were dooming ourselves irrevocably to a life of exile.

‘We needn’t look so far ahead,’ I answered when Terry asked how long the ammunition would last. ‘Every other thing that makes life sufferable will be finished long before the ammunition is used up.’

‘Very well,’ she agreed. ‘There’s not much point in planning for the distant future when a thousand things may happen to upset our arrangements.’

‘How much salt have we?’ I inquired.

We had sufficient to carry us on to spring at our present rate of use, but, as I pointed out, in winter we would have storms and we must salt a store of meat against them.

‘And how we are going to do it is beyond my imagination,’ I went on, ‘for we have neither tub nor barrel.’