‘How do I speak to you?’ I inquired with defensive roughness.

‘Are you tired of me?’ she asked in low tones.

I stood staring at the floor of the cave with its litter of tins. Though it drove a knife into my heart to see her sad and hurt I could not help hurting her, and I waited a long minute before I muttered, ‘No.’

‘What about tobacco?’ she said in a strangled voice.

‘It’ll go done. Oh, what does it matter, what does anything matter?’

‘We can live well enough until spring,’ she continued in the same voice.

‘And what then?’ I demanded.

I felt her hand on my arm, and her voice, full of tears, asked gently:

‘Is it the house, Hugh?’ Then she came near me and said: ‘Look at me, Hugh.’

I raised my eyes unwillingly. My cheeks were burning hot.

‘My dear, my heart, my love, my only love,’ she whispered. ‘I wish I could help you—can’t you tell me—’

‘What’ll I tell you?’ I cried wildly, ‘that every mortal thing is drear and hopeless and my heart’s dead in my body, dead as a stone, and I wish I was dead too.’

‘Hush, hush,’ she entreated, ‘we’ve each other still.’

‘How can I hush?’ I raged. ‘We’re here for ever, Terry, we’ll never escape, we’ll starve and rot in this den, this hole in the rocks. Was it for this we were born, to live like beasts without hope?’

‘We’ll go and cut more peats,’ she said gently. ‘Soon it’ll be better, soon we’ll be done with remembering the pain of the thing that’s in our heads, a little time changes the worst things out of their shape and makes us masters again in the house of our own minds.’

I was deserted suddenly by the raging energy, compounded of anger and pain, which possessed me since we returned from our journey; it made me fly from one task to another, now cutting a bench of peats in the bog, again counting the time our stores would last, then trailing roots of bog-fir from their mossy resting-place beside the loch; it left me and I grew so tired that I could scarcely stand on my feet.

‘What’s the good?’ I asked wearily when Terry said we ought to go to our peats.

‘Are you tired, Hugh?’ she asked.

‘I’m blind with tiredness,’ I answered. ‘Tired and sick.’

‘Then rest,’ she urged. ‘You’ve been overdoing it of late. No human being could stand up to the pace you were setting yourself.’

‘Oh, Terry, Terry!’ I cried. ‘It’s a dreadful thing to be outcasts and fugitives.’

‘Other people have been fugitives before us,’ she said.

‘We’ll go to the peats,’ I muttered.