We climbed to the hill-top and I cut the turf from a new bank of peat. The day was hot but fresh with a brisk wind from the south. There were as yet no clegs on the high ground to plague us and make the heat of summer a scourge instead of a pleasure. The spade went smoothly into the black moist bank, the sun shone in its azure world, the wind came sweetly over peaks that still kept snow in their north corries facing us. My spirits rose, gloom lightened, and as my strength returned and I worked I felt the content of the summer day that reigned over our country enter my heart. And Terry, with a red handkerchief knotted at the corners on her head to keep her black hair from her eyes and the force of the sun from her brain, bare-armed and bare-legged and eager, ran back and fore with peats in her arms to spread them out to dry. I commenced to feel free from my nightmarish oppression. I could think clearly. In a moment of realization when I knew that I was escaping from the horror which preyed on me I let the spade fall from my hands. The wind was like water on my arms. I breathed the air like a blind man who with restored sight gazes on the clear outlined world. Terry cried, ‘Isn’t it grand, up here, on the top of the world!’

‘It’s very fine,’ I answered gravely. She began to laugh like a happy child and dance amongst the peats, waving her bare peat-smeared arms over her head.

We bathed in Loch Coulter; we lay at the mouth of our cave to attend night’s summer shade; we saw the rough hills climb up against the sky and it grew dark enough for stars to shine. There are moments when misery departs that require no voice; we waited in silence until night reached its deepest, though it was only twilight still.

‘Our garden was no more our own than this,’ Terry said.

‘This!’ I cried, startled. ‘We made our garden, Terry—’

‘Poor garden!’ she sighed. ‘No one watering it in this heat!’

‘And all the weeds spreading like fire,’ I took her up. ‘I wonder what creatures broke into the house, Terry.’

She did not answer.

‘Will we ever leave here?’ I asked a few minutes later.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I scarcely care. We are free, here’s no fret nor rumours. Are you happier, Hugh?’

‘Happy? I don’t know—I’m not unhappy.’

‘You were unhappy.’

‘What else could I be? Oh but we shouldn’t have been so weak, Terry, we shouldn’t have let it overwhelm us. We came back without a single thing to help us. After all our planning, after that long journey, we came back without one of the things we went for—’

‘Excepting resolution,’ she interrupted quietly.