ONE did not lightly telephone. There was a telephone six miles away, at Ballyhinch, but its use made excessive demands upon the sympathy and attention of the post-mistress. Marda could not understand—as Sir Richard said, one would think she had come from America. From all their angles she seemed to them very modern. They sat on the steps after breakfast, waiting for post to come, discussing what they should do. There was something agonizing to Sir Richard in the thought of that suitcase. Marda said, it would not have mattered at all but that her tennis shoes seemed to be in it. It was quite a relief when the postman settled the matter by saying there had been another raid last night in the Brittas direction and that all the wires were down again. It had been a great raid, the postman said; if the boys had not fled it would have been almost a battle. What times, said Francie, looking at Marda doubtfully, they did live in! But other times, said Marda, other disadvantages. Nobody hurt, they hoped? Well, said the postman, the Black and Tans had been fired on, but why would they not be, they themselves firing to the left and right continually? It seemed two of them ones had pitched from the lorry the way you would think they’d be killed and the boys had bolted, leaving the two lying.

“How do you know?” said Marda. The postman, looking austerely at her, asked how would one help hearing? Though it was not for him to say what was true and what was what you would hear. Sir Richard agreed with this hastily and with some warmth: he did not want to have the postman discouraged.

Marda received her six letters as a matter of course and glanced them through sceptically. Lois watched her. Putting the letters away Marda suggested that, since Laurence was so practical, he should drive her into Clonmore or Ballydarra to buy more tennis shoes. Laurence feared he did not drive the car nicely: he could avoid things but he was inclined to wobble.

Sir Richard had disappeared on his morning round; how much of his corn had been “laid” by the rain last night he did not like to imagine; it was better to know. The rain had ceased before breakfast; loud drops still drummed through the leaves; the trees with their rainy smell were a wall of moisture. Thin vapours trailed on the sky over an intermittent brightness; distances showed up thinly, as though painted. “The end of our weather,” said poor Francie.

“But I feel,” persisted Marda, “I must have tennis shoes. I don’t mind wobbling.”

“Laurence is more of the intellectual type,” explained Francie.

“I don’t think that matters.”

“It does with a car,” said Lois.

“I have never consciously driven you,” said her cousin coldly.

Marda laughed; she got up and stood on the steps. Fixed in their row, the others all looked up at her. She was tall; her back, as she stood looking over the fields, was like a young man’s in its vigorous slightness. She escaped the feminine pear-shape, her shoulders were square, legs long from the knee down. Her light-brown dress slipped and fitted with careless accuracy, defining spareness negatively under its slack folds. Sophistication opened further horizons to Lois. Marda gathered her strung cornelians in one hand into a bunch at her throat; they slipped down the nape of her neck. Standing vaguely she had still that quality of directedness—from which they all swerved off in their different ways. A hardy unawareness of self in her heightened one’s own consciousness. Her lightest look watched, her casual listening assessed, her speech was a lightning attack on one’s integrity out of the stronghold of her indifference.

They remained sitting behind her with a vague sensation of having been abandoned. Hugo came out, shut the glass door with precision and blinked at the sky. “Clearing,” he said, then asked Marda to come for a turn. Exercise seemed the order of the morning; Lois and Laurence were later to go to the village with messages. Francie was waiting to go to the garden with Lady Naylor.

“Am I or am I not to drive her?” wondered Laurence aloud, with fatalism, looking after Miss Norton.

“She’ll certainly let you know.” Francie’s little ironical smile sent her cheeks up, their faint flush wavering, under her eyes. She was not so simple. Her diffidence, her inquiring softness, an outward “laciness” of her personality—into which impressions seemingly filtered like light, diffusedly, making no impact—covered a structure of delicate hardness. She was in spirit insistent, tenacious and quick in antagonisms; complexity tightened, as had been her delicate body’s, by constant resistance to pain. She gave hospitality to the ever-living Laura, she invited claims from Mrs. Archie Trent, she would have endowed Lois, but she watched Marda turn beside Hugo into the beech walk with raised brows, a cat’s blank unsparing lucidity.

“She’s very positive,” said Laurence, still looking after them.

“Positive about what?” asked Lois eagerly. Laurence held his breath with annoyance and pulled up a sock.

Marda wanted nothing of Mr. Montmorency but entertainment. She was an experienced fellow-visitor. He interested her; his negativeness was startling. She had heard of him, and of it, in all parts of the country, had arrived at several houses into a loud reaction, a kind of indignant excitement following his departure. Her acquiescence in finding him so exactly as he had been described was tempered by incredulity, almost shock. And she could define in him qualities which her friends in the rush of discussion had slurred or had overshot: one, a kind of drawn-back apprehension in his approaches, as though something bright were being brandished before his eyes. His look, coming wavering round this interruption, had, in regard to herself, a peculiar intensity. She was already real to him as a woman.

He now swung his blackthorn, slashing the air widely. “I remember this walk,” she said. “I seem to have been here yesterday. But I thought it was somewhere in Kerry, at Castle Reagh.”

“Oh no, it is here,” he said wisely. They laughed. Down the walk, brightening air slipped like gauze round the beech trunks; great pewter limbs went turning and straining up with the sheen of muscles. Drops, infrequent and startling, loudly fell on his hat brim, icily on her shoulders through the mesh of her dress. The path’s perspective was a tunnel of glass. Her companion’s lameness of thought, the faltering silence produced a kind of vacuum in her; she covered a yawn.

“This is not a good morning,” he suggested, “to walk under trees.”

“Really the worst possible.”

“Oh ... had we better⁠—?” However, they walked on.

“I always come here,” he said in extenuation. “My turn to the right’s mechanical. I was here as a boy, you know.”

“Were you here when I bled so much at that children’s party?”

“Not actually, but I have always heard of it. Didn’t you lose a ring?”

“At another party, at a more suitable age. It was the most lovely ring I have ever had—Regent Street. The jeweller said it must be emeralds because the lady was Irish and Timothy fully agreed with him. I had had no idea I had such an expensive nationality.”

“What a pity!”

“Yes, those things are always a pity.”

He was not sure how much she included. “Did your—did Timothy mind?”

“Not so much as the Naylors. Later, he was killed on the Somme. But he had two sons first, so it all came right—I mean, he married.”

“Oh yes ... I suppose you are often here? I have often heard of you. And at Johnstown and Ballyduff and up in the North I have heard you expected. But I was always going. Once, I believe, we crossed at an avenue gate.”

The fact was, she acknowledged with a laugh, that they both visited incorrigibly. She knew also, she told him, that he not only visited but travelled; he had been almost everywhere but Canada.

“But I really should not have come back here,” she said. “There is something in Lady Naylor’s eye: a despairing optimism. I feel that suitcase won’t be the end of me here. There will be a raid and I shall be shot on the avenue, not even fatally, or Laurence will take me out and upset that car. Then really she will never forgive me, though the efforts she makes will follow me over Europe.... How far do you think this war is going to go? Will there ever be anything we can all do except not notice?”

“Don’t ask me,” he said, but sighed sharply as though beneath the pressure of omniscience. “A few more hundred deaths, I suppose, on our side—which is no side—rather scared, rather isolated, not expressing anything except tenacity to something that isn’t there—that never was there. And deprived of heroism by this wet kind of smother of commiseration. What’s the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually—our sense of personality is a sense of outrage and we’ll never get outside of it.”

But the hold of the country was that, she considered, it could be thought of in terms of oneself, so interpreted. Or seemed so—“Like Shakespeare,” she added more vaguely, “or isn’t it?... But now tell me,” she said, “about Lois?”

“Lois?” He was guiltily startled, thinking of Laura’s daughter.

“Lois—haven’t you noticed her? She sat beside you at dinner.”

He feared he was no good at people, he was preparing to say—but the remark, tried over critically, seemed a kind of echo: he reminded himself of Laurence. He was confused by her cool watching, her eyebrows drawn up and together in ironical friendly despair at him. Her face—like a Dutch doll’s; he defensively told himself, in its accurate clear disposition of red-and-white colour—was, at this sudden pull-up to her interest, like a mask in its halt of expression. Her features, the dark line of hair springing over the white square of forehead, were in their special relation like something almost too clearly written that he still could not read; to be learnt now and puzzled over in retrospect.

She was, in fact, repelled by his lack of sympathy. “Lois,” she said, “is nice. She is in such a hurry, so concentrated upon her hurry, so helpless. She is like some one being driven against time in a taxi to catch a train, jerking and jerking to help the taxi and looking wildly out of the window at things going slowly past. She keeps hearing that final train go out without her. How I should hate to be young again! But, I had no ambitions.”

He watched her unguarded profile. “Oh yes,” he said, “ambition?”

“I’ve never met any woman so determined to love well, so anxious to love soon, so certain of her ability. She really prays for somebody to be fatal; she eyes doors. And you are all disappointments.”

“To begin with,” said Hugo, nettled. “She’s not a woman⁠—”

“Awful if nothing happens to her! She reminds me, too, of a little girl I remember at school sports; in a team race, one of those things with bean-bags. Hopping at the end of the line, working up to the front slowly, simply sick with eagerness. Her turn comes, she is the whole world: her eyes shoot out of her head—she drops the bean-bag. They all groan.... It makes me go dry inside to think of it now.”

“There is a young man—Harold—Gerald. They dance on the avenue.”

“Like rabbits?”

“They have a gramophone.”

“Is he supposed to love her?”

“My wife thinks so. Laurence considers he suitably might. Her aunt does not think it suitable at all and won’t hear a word of it, so he officially doesn’t.”

“Anyhow, to be loved is not her affair at all, it is quite irrelevant. She does not love him, poor little thing: he is useless.”

“I can’t think it necessary for a young girl, at her age, to love anybody.”

“Oh, it is not,” she said impatiently, “at any age. But one has those ideas.”

This dismissal, this lightness vexed him. Let her speak for herself. She had, then, her whole sex’s limitations: a teachable shallowness, a hundred little abilities. But he, prey to a constant self-reproach, was a born lover; conscious of cycles in him, springs and autumns of desire and disenchantment, and of the intermediate pausing seasons, bland or frigid, eaten at either margin by past or coming shadows of change.

“I have not these ideas,” he said coldly.

They turned at the end of the walk through a gateway, into a fir plantation. Here they walked between walls of dusk, to be released to an airy green space, tree-pillared. The green strip, measureless on ahead but narrow, slanted down on their left to the open meadows, on their right was bounded by an uneven wall. Below the wall an unseen swift stream flowed, tinkling and knocking. The path hesitated ahead of them, faint on the bright green turf. Here the few beeches stood, unrelated, lovely, desultory; between their trunks—the tall mountains, vivid in a suffusion of distant light. The scene glittered. “More rain coming,” said Mr. Montmorency.

But she stared ahead. A trench-coat flickered between the trees, approaching. Her look focussed; there was an interchange. Coming to them, the young man almost hurried. After consideration: “Hullo!” said Mr. Montmorency.

“Hal-lo!” cried Gerald, flushing with expectation. Never had they been so acclaimed. He was out this way, he explained, coming into ear-shot, and was proposing to take advantage of something rash that Lady Naylor had once said about dropping in to lunch any time. “They’re not out?” he asked suddenly with, Marda noticed, a queer haggardness. They were not? That was splendid, marvellous. Early about?—he had been out all night, he told them. Oh yes—feeling Mr. Montmorency glance at his chin interrogatively—he had shaved by the road; he had brought his tackle with him, he often did. Here—no, that was his pistol: the other pocket. Marda extolled his foresight. Mr. Montmorency had forgotten to introduce them; they stood socially grouped round a beech and exchanged cigarettes.

“Very busy now?” said Marda, bending down to the match Gerald sheltered.

“Off and on—generally on, but we don’t know.” She really seemed most remarkable, he looked intently, just lightly enough to avoid a stare. He liked talk like this, square and facty, compact with assumptions Pleasant that she should be here at the house for lunch. Light slipped back over the dints of her hair as she looked up again. Lunch seemed a torch in the future; between now and lunch-time he would have come on Lois, somewhere, somehow, and amazingly kissed her amazed hands. There would be, till the kiss, no speaking—there she eluded him. He had thought this out.

He had thought this out, seen ahead to this climax rather—as though a flower’s centre had been revealed by an impetuous opening out of lovely confused petals—on the lorry, breasting the darkness. Watching the morning skylines form and creep out like enemies from the cold night, he had burned at her nearness under the insistent groping of the wind. Rushing under his eyes the hedge-tops shivered; he had laughed and shivered, hand in his pistol pocket, hand on his razor. And now, as looking at Marda he once more kissed Lois’s hands, he knew once more, assured by her eyes, that keen truth of the first showing of daylight. He was fortified in assurance. Leaning with her elbow against the tree, returning casually his directness of look, she recalled some profound and certain excitement, as of his first approach to the War. Now he meant to go past the hands, to kiss the curve of Lois’s cheek as she strained away, then stamp her uncertain mouth with his own certainty. Naïvely, he looked at his wrist-watch.

“Yes, go on,” she said, looking up through trees where a bright breath disturbed the closeness. He looked past her, the path led to Lois. This green open path spaced out with trees was (he afterwards thought) like something in heaven.

“It will rain by lunch-time,” said Mr. Montmorency. And indeed the sky was already creeping together and fading, and the mountains’ sharpness seemed a kind of anxiety.

“I wish,” said Gerald to Marda, “you’d been out up there this morning. You wouldn’t know where you were, with the light coming.”

“Is there a smell of daylight? I once heard a man say⁠—”

“Well, that is just like me—I was smoking.”

“Look, you must go on.”

“Yes, perhaps⁠—” He went on. She was left only half protected by irony from an inrush of desolation. His look and smile clung to her memory with the tenacity of irrelevance: his steps on the grass died out quickly. There was silence: a cold apprehension of rain in the beeches, the tinkling and knocking of water beyond the wall. Hugo, having walked a short way ahead, looked back at her sharply. She was startled. “Bother!” she thought. For there was bother behind the look.

“Do we go on?” They walked on, but were oppressed by their lack of objective. They met the white stare of a cottage, stared and turned.

“Dannie Regan lives there: he shot out an eye shooting rabbits and now he’s losing the sight of the other. I used to go out with him when I was a boy—so high. His mother lives with him—or should still; I haven’t heard that she’s gone. She must be a hundred and four.”

“Do you know the man I am going to marry, Leslie Lawe? He’s a stockbroker; he fishes a good deal. His people are in Meath.”

“Meath?... I didn’t know you⁠—”

“I am really. I haven’t told the Naylors. They think my engagements fantastic; you see, they have all come to nothing. But I ought to have told the Naylors; it ought to have come at once, but there was that wretched suitcase. I will say something at dinner, not lunch: please do something to lessen the atmosphere of surprise.”

“When?”

“Oh, we think this winter.”

He looked from one window of the cottage to the other. “It will make a break in the winter,” he said at last. “I dare say you will go somewhere sunny. Algiers perhaps—Morocco, if you are able.”

“Yes, he is quite rich.”

“I shouldn’t go to the Riviera.... But I thought you didn’t believe in this sort of thing?”

“I? Oh, I never said so.”

Now he came to think of it, she had not explicitly said so. “I hope you will be happy.”

“I don’t expect I shall be much different.”

“I think,” he said, “I must go in and talk to Dannie. He will have heard I’m back. It seems a good time now—do you mind?”

“I’ll talk to Mrs. Regan.”

“She’s deaf.”

“Then we’ll smile at each other—she’s not blind.”

They approached the doorway that yearned up the path like an eye-socket. A breath of peat smoke, of cold trodden earth, of the ghostly dark of white walls came out from the cottage. Dannie took form on the darkness, searching with his one eye. He stood with his white beard, helpless and eager. “Well!” exclaimed Hugo. Then Dannie broke out: this was young Mr. Hugo, wasn’t he the lovely gentleman, as fine and upstanding as ever. And here was his wife he’d brought with him, the beautiful lady. And, trembling and searching, he took Marda’s hand. He declared that she brought back the sight of youth to his eyes.