We dug up the small nuts that grow at the root of a white-flowered plant on grassy slopes, as I used to when I was a boy.

The arrival of ripe blaeberries saved us from worrying about scurvy.

‘And after them come crowberries.’ I said, ‘and cranberries then, and cloudberries. Terry, before we lack we’ll go down to the fields at Kinlochlaggan or Laggan Bridge and steal turnips, like our neighbours the deer.’

‘We’ll have to,’ she said simply.

When we had eaten dinner we bathed in Loch Coulter. If there was time to spare before bright day arrived we set a line for pike. We took food once again in mid-morning. We gave ourselves a precious bannock of oatcake spread thinly with jam or thickly with deer-fat, or we had scones that Terry baked on the griddle. We drank water.

We often say, in wonder-struck tones after a plain bare meal, that we never felt so well in all our lives before.

The strict routine lasted less than a week. We found, as we did months ago, that this life does not permit the unyielding governance of a time-table. We have gradually made our routine elastic again, though we keep generally to our framework of hours. We take no risks. The dread of discovery is very present in our minds though we scarcely know why we are afraid to be seen or what discovery entails. Our first instinct, when anything surprises us, is to hide.

‘We are like wild animals,’ I said when Terry marvelled at our continual alertness. ‘Always watching, always scared, always ready to run and hide. No one will surprise us now, Terry, we’ve got back old lost instincts for danger.’

‘We’ll be pretty objects if we go back amongst people,’ I went on. ‘We’ll be dodging and starting and turning our heads every minute of the day.’

‘We won’t like it, when we go back,’ she took me up.

‘How?’ I wanted to know.

‘You may hate solitude, Hugh, but it changes you. When we go back we’ll be like country folk in a city. We’ll be crowded, and overlooked, and choked for lack of room. We won’t take well to a house—’

‘Like the tinkers,’ I laughed.

‘Choking for lack of room to breathe,’ she went on seriously.

‘If we go back,’ I interrupted her. ‘And if we go back there may not be so many people round us to crowd us as there used to be.’

We stared at each other, and I could read in her eyes, as she read in mine, the fear and despair that we strove daily to hide even from ourselves. We could not cheat ourselves all the time, and even when we seemed to forget the reason for our escape, those guns we heard spoke to our secret minds, and the thought of war disturbed our inmost thoughts.