I suppose I cried too, for the civilization that brought us to exile had first unfitted us for the life of outlaws. When that May storm was past we stood together in the mouth of the cave. The wind had fallen and the sun shone, altering the tumbled desolation round us from the appearance it bore while the east wind blew. Nesting grouse called in the valley, and an early deer calf, high in its lair in a corrie, lamented its hunger and its absent mother.

‘If we could sleep winter through—’ I sighed.

‘We have all summer to make ready in,’ Terry answered. ‘We’ll manage without sleeping, Hugh. Haven’t we peats and bog-fir and a store of matches?’

‘What am I going to write?’ I asked.

‘Write,’ she bade me, ‘how we saw war coming. And war came. Write that we would not be militarized nor suffer the shame and injuries people would put on us for hating war. Tell how we left our house by night. Soon we’ll have enough grouse feathers to make a feather-bed, and our peats are ready for stacking—’

‘Yes!’ I cried, infected by her enthusiasm; ‘and we made stuff to pickle eggs, and built a wall at the end of the cave—’

‘A million things to write,’ she said. ‘Here’s a pencil; put it all down every single thing we did.’

So I took a notebook in one hand and my telescope in the other, and slung my little rifle over my shoulder in case a grouse or hare came within range since we could not afford to let slip a single chance of getting food, though it was breeding-time and I was loath to kill. When I had spied to make sure that the country was vacant except for ourselves and birds and beasts I sat down in the lee of a great stone, warmed and illumined by the midday sun, and began to recall how we came into the hills, while Terry put water in a basin to clean the rocky cavern where we hid.

It was strange, but as I tried to recall the past which was so near in point of days, I found that the past, distant and near, was faint and scarcely to be recalled. Things no more than a month old, the fret and confusion of our escape which I thought was indelibly marked on my memory, proved suddenly as insubstantial and dispersed as the puffs of mist which float across a sunlit morning hill, dappled by clouds and sun. I could remember many times when Terry and myself said, ‘We’ll never forget this to our dying day,’ and the fact of the event which made us speak so was clear enough in my memory, but I could not feel it. These old events seemed like things I had been told, and heard with a vagrant mind.