SIR RICHARD, to whom the idea about Lois and Gerald percolated in time through the family conversation, declared the idea was preposterous. What chiefly worried him was, might she not have mentioned to Gerald those guns in the lower plantations? He had charged her not to, but she was just like Laura, poor Laura’s own child in fact; she would talk and talk and you never knew where you had her. He announced, he had been thinking for some time subalterns should be fewer and more infrequent. He was delighted when he heard from the postman, and was able to pass on, how three young women in the Clonmore direction had had their hair cut off by masked men for walking out with the soldiers. And indeed they had got no sympathy from the priest either, the postman said, for the priest knew that English soldiers were most immoral.

“And how would you like it,” Sir Richard said to his niece indignantly, “if a thing like that were to happen to you?”

“I should be bobbed,” said Lois. “I should take it as a sign. But I have never walked an inch with anyone, not what you would call out, Uncle Richard.”

“But masked men,” said Lady Naylor, “would be a very nasty experience for a girl of your age.” Lois said she would prefer the men to be masked; she would be less embarrassed in the event of meeting them afterwards.

“I wonder what they do with the hair,” she added. She thought inwardly: “If they’re going to take this attitude, I could not be blamed for falling in love with a married man.” She searched her heart anxiously. She wrote to Viola that she feared she might be falling in love with a married man. But when she looked at Mr. Montmorency next morning at breakfast, and still more when she had to drive him back from Mount Isabel, the idea seemed shocking. She regretted having sent her letter to post in such a hurry.

Scandalized by the memory, she drove home briskly. On the bright sky, opposite, Mr. Montmorency’s pale face hung like an apparition’s. She took the curves of Mount Isabel drive with a rattle: the trap swung on its axle, the traces creaked. Beyond the gates, light lay flat and yellow along the hedges where brambles showered; hard red blackberries knocked on the spokes and swung back, shining. She took the short way, over a shoulder of mountain; the light-pink road crunched under the wheels like sugar. Coming up out from the lanes they bathed an hour or so in the glare of space. Height had the quality of depth: as they mounted they seemed to be striking deeper into the large mild crystal of an inverted sea. Out of the distance everywhere, pointless and unrelated, space came like water between them, slipping and widening. They receded from one another into the vacancy. On yellow furze-dust, light was hard and physical; over parching heather shadow faded and folded tone on tone, and was drawn to the sky on delicate brittle peaks.

The road bent over a ridge, the trap ran down on the pony’s rump; he and she shifted back on their seats. They stared with unfocussed intensity over each other’s shoulders. Gorse, they said, was never out of bloom (he commented). Nor kissing, they said (she supplied), out of season—yet she supposed this untrue; she supposed that they both sometimes must be. “And so much bitterness,” he exclaimed, “over this empty country!”

“What is it exactly,” she asked, “that they mean by freedom? What does it affect? What is it besides an excuse for war?”

“I suppose,” he said in his faint voice, as at the pit of a yawn, “some kind of a final peace—stability.”

“Then to fight’s absurd; the more one keeps on, the further from it one is. It’s a hopeless kind of beginning.” She looked at him earnestly, lucidly, like a puppy.

“You are very reasonable.... Do you read the papers?”

“Well ... I do hate things that have just happened.”

“—I don’t follow?”

“They’re so raw.”

The road was steep and the pony determined to trot; it stumbled; she pulled it up sharply. She was inclined to forget she was driving at all. He started and put out a hand, to steady himself, along the back of the seat. He hated things to be done badly; he was old-maidish. They were silent in a mutual criticism. As they came down and the mountains, drawn behind, were once more scenic, as hedges ran up at the sides of the road, the illusion of distance between them faded; they obtruded upon each other; a time when they could have talked was gone. They might have said, she felt now, anything; but what had remained unsaid, never conceived in thought, would exercise now a stronger compulsion upon their attitude. She was to believe they had approached each other in the unintimacy of silence. Shy with retrospective emotion she fidgeted in the trap, irked by his look, his manner, all his presence physically. Whenever she stretched a foot it touched his, always she seemed to be retreating, apologizing, having to shift her position. When she sat well forward to give her attention to driving, their knees touched.

“This trap’s too small,” she said finally. Mr. Montmorency—face dull on the bright sky—replied: “Oh, I don’t know—it depends on how one arranges oneself.” If he only would not smile—but he smiled constrainedly. Next to Laura, she was the most fidgety person from whom he had suffered. But Laura’s unrepose had been an irradiation, a quiver of personality. She was indefinite definitely, like a tree shining, shaking away outlines; a bay, a poplar in wind and sunshine. Her impulses—those incalculable springings-out of mind through the body—had had, like movements of branches, a wild kind of certainty. He had been half aware of some kind of design in her being of which she was unaware wholly.

Whereas, here still was Lois (now Laura’s tree had fallen), twisted away from him on the opposite seat of the trap, outraging tone in her pink jersey—a shade or two nearer than Laura, perhaps, to the accuracy passing for beauty. She looked gênée, dispirited; some failure, no doubt, in his company: he must be an old man to her. She glanced back once or twice at the mountains, from which a light peaty breath still came after them down the descending road.

She laughed suddenly, parted the reins, and jerking a rein in each hand, with wide elbows, chirruped and clucked to the pony. “This,” she said, “is how my governess used to drive. She used to say it came natural because all her people were horsey. She said her father had been a colonel and she used to plait hats out of crinkled paper and wear them. She loved my mother embarrassingly, and she was always embroidering things. My mother hated it—do you remember?”

“I don’t remember your governess. Hated what?”

“Being loved like that, and given embroidery. Miss Part used to laugh and say, ‘I’m afraid I’m terribly whimsical, Mrs. Farquar,’ and Mother used to say, ‘Oh no, I don’t expect you are really’—was it unkind?”

“Well, it sounds unkind.”

“I wonder if she would have liked being loved at my age—do you remember?”

“I don’t suppose she had made up her mind.”

Lois turned and looked at him so intently that he was uneasy suddenly: the bottom dropped out of the past, spilling all its security. He would never know how much Laura had said to her daughter those last ten years—years locked away from him: Lois had got the key. He said with acidity: “If she and I had married⁠—”

“Oh, yes....”

“My dear child, you wouldn’t be here.”

“Oh, but half of me would be. And I dare say,” she said charmingly, “the other half of me would have been much nicer.” The turning away of her look was more confidential than any directness.

“Thank you—don’t run over the little pigs!”

Michael Connor’s farm first announced itself by some pink little silky pigs running along the roadside. A sow got up, like a very maternal battleship. Connor children looked, shrieked, fell from a gate and fled to the farmhouse, skirting a pool of liquid manure in the front yard. It was a nice farm, Lois pointed out, it had the door and window-frames painted blue, the colour of all the cart-wheels. The Connors were darling people; she drove past slowly, leaning over the side of the trap to see if the family were about. The house was one story high, with a slate roof. Mr. Montmorency sat frowning; he could not remember if this were a Michael Connor he ought to remember.

Michael Connor came out from a furze-thatched shed at the side. He took off his wide straw hat and shook hands with them both. His hand was bony, nervous and dry as earth. “It’s a grand evening,” said he with a melancholy smile.

“It is indeed. And how,” she asked, apprehensive, “is Mrs. Connor?”

“Ah, the poor woman ... the poor woman!” Michael looked away from them, nobody spoke. Lois at last said: “Give her my love.”

“I will,” said Michael, “and proud she will be. And yourself’s looking lovely, Miss Lois; a fine strong lady, glory be to God.”

“You remember Mr. Montmorency?”

“Sure indeed I do!” exclaimed Michael, and shook hands with Mr. Montmorency again with greater particularity. “And very well I remember his poor father. You are looking grand, sir, fine and stout; I known you all these years and I declare I never seen you looking stouter. And welcome back to Danielstown, Mr. Montmorency, welcome back, sir!”

“Are your grandchildren well?”

“They are,” said Connor gloomily, “but they’re very bashful. And they do be stravaging about always and not contented at all. They are a great distress to herself, and she unable to come out after them.”

“But is Mrs. Peter Connor not with you?”

“She is, Miss Lois. But she is desthroyed with it all and disheartened. Indeed, miss, she is in great distress; and she always looking and starting and craning up the boreen. It is torn in herself she is; distracted for Peter and dhreading he’ll come. It would dishearten yous to be with her daily and nightly the way she is, the poor woman. And the military from Carveen have the hearts torn out of us nightly, and we stretched for sleep, chasing and charging about in the lorries they have. Sure you cannot go a step above in the mountains without them ones lepping out from your feet like rabbits. Isn’t it the great pity they didn’t finish their German war once they had it started?”

“And no news at all of Peter?” Lois asked, diffident.

“We have not,” said Michael, expressionless. His face resumed its repose. The sum of detachment and sadness was this special kind of nobility. “And I don’t know what is to be the end of it,” resumed Michael, with a return to his conversational manner. “I couldn’t tell you what will be the outcome at all. These surely are times that would take the heart from you. And thank you, Miss Lois, and you too yourself, your honour.”

They once more shook hands, complimented each other again on the beauty of the evening, and Lois drove on. Michael stood at the gate till they turned the corner. The mountain farm, its wind-bitten firs dragged east, its furze-thatched byres, sank slowly under the curve of a hill. Looking longest after them, like an eye, a window glittered. Some grey geese that had gaped and straggled behind the trap relinquished the chase abruptly, stumbled round in a flock and went straining off in the other direction. Their backs were more than oblivious; they made the trap, the couple in it, an illusion. And indeed Lois and Hugo both felt that their pause, their talk, their passing had been less than a shadow.

“That is not,” said Hugo, after reflection, “the Michael Connor that I remember. He was a foxy man with a chin. Has that one a son Peter?”

“He has. I expect you guessed—he is on the run—‘Proscribed’ don’t they call it? He could be shot at sight. He is wanted over an ambush in County Clare; they got him once, but he escaped again—I was so glad. I shouldn’t wonder if he was up the boreen at the moment. I know he is home, for Clancey saw him three days ago. But don’t speak of it—one cannot be too careful. Poor Mrs. Peter must be in a dreadful state, wherever he is. Mrs. Michael is dying, you know: she has been dying a long time. The last time I went up they wouldn’t let me see her, because of the pain.... There are young men gone from three of the farms up here—Captain Carmichael told me; he is Intelligence Officer. And I know it is true, because Clancey told me too—I say, supposing Gerald had happened to be with us and Peter Connor had come down the boreen, would Gerald have had to have shot him, or would he have been off duty?”

“Peter might have shot Gerald.”

“Oh no, not when he was with me. Besides,” she added, “Gerald is so matter of fact. Nothing could make him into a tragedy.”

Hugo debating if she were subtle or very stupid, Lois busy with melodrama, they drove home briskly. To the south, below them, the demesne trees of Danielstown made a dark formal square like a rug on the green country. In their heart, like a dropped pin, the grey glazed roof reflecting the sky lightly glinted. Looking down, it seemed to Lois they lived in a forest; space of lawns blotted out in the pressure and dusk of trees. She wondered they were not smothered; then wondered still more that they were not afraid. Far from here too, their isolation became apparent. The house seemed to be pressing down low in apprehension, hiding its face, as though it had her vision of where it was. It seemed to gather its trees close in fright and amazement at the wide, light, lovely unloving country, the unwilling bosom whereon it was set. From the slope’s foot, where Danielstown trees began, the land stretched out in a plain flat as water, basin of the Madder and Darra and their fine wandering tributaries, till the far hills, faint and brittle, straining against the inrush of vaster distance, cut the droop of the sky like a glass blade. Fields gave back light to the sky—the hedges netting them over thinly and penetrably—as though the sheen of grass were a shadow on water, a breath of colour clouding the face of light. Rivers, profound in brightness, flowed over beds of glass. The cabins lifting their pointed white ends, the pink and yellow farms were but half opaque; cast doubtfully on their fields the shadow of living. Square cattle moved in the fields like saints, with a mindless certainty. Single trees, on a rath, at the turn of a road, drew up light at their roots. Only the massed trees—spread like a rug to dull some keenness, break some contact between self and senses perilous to the routine of living—only the trees of the demesne were dark, exhaling darkness. Down among them, dusk would stream up the paths ahead, lie stagnant over the lawns, would mount in the tank of garden, heightening the walls, dulling the borders like a rain of ashes. Dusk would lie where one looked as though it were in one’s eyes, as though the fountain of darkness were in one’s own perception. Seen from above, the house in its pit of trees seemed a very reservoir of obscurity; from the doors one must come out stained with it. And the kitchen smoke, lying over the vague trees doubtfully, seemed the very fume of living.

But as they drove down the home-sense quickened; the pony, knowing these hedges, rocketed hopefully in the shafts. The house became a magnet to their dependence. And indeed it was nice, they felt in this evening air, to be driving home, with all they would have to tell of the Mount Isabel party, to all they would have to hear of Sir Richard’s day in Cork. Friendly women smiled at them over half-doors of cabins. And they both felt approached, friendlier, turning in up the avenue under the arch of the trees; he accepting her with philosophy as though she were his daughter, she comforted in her fancy, as though he had wept coming over the mountains and told her his life was empty because she could never be his wife.

She said: “I hope we shan’t have to wait for dinner; I couldn’t bear it.” He said: “Really?” shocked to discover that he also had been thinking of dinner.

Livvy Thompson had ridden over; she sat on the steps with her habit over her knee, waving as they approached. She had sent a message round to the yard when she heard the trap, so that a man immediately came to take the pony. “Listen now⁠—” she began. But Lois only gave her a brush of the hand; she couldn’t speak till she had rushed past her into the hall to look for the post, because of a tearing feeling of expectation. There was Viola’s square blue temperate envelope on the table. There was nothing more but some gloves Lady Naylor had worn in Cork, some English papers, a box of tennis balls. She had again that conclusive feeling of disappointment. “They’re back,” she said to Hugo.

“Listen now,” resumed Livvy, coming in after her. Lois slipped Viola’s letter into her pocket and buttoned the flap over it. For what Viola would think of Livvy she did not like to imagine.

Livvy was anxious to know if Lois had seen Mr. Lesworth lately, and, if so, whether he had happened to mention Mr. Armstrong. Because it did seem strange, she thought, about Mr. Armstrong; she almost feared that he must be ill. When she heard Mr. Lesworth had not appeared either, she was amazed, she said, that Lois was not more worried. It was now too evident something must be the matter. She pointed out it was her duty and Lois’s to find out if they were ill, or indeed if worse hadn’t happened, as worse might, to the two young Englishmen in a hostile country. Lois, thumbing Viola’s envelope, said she was quite certain they would have heard. Livvy suspected something was hushed up for fear of the English papers: nothing was ever allowed in the English papers that could be mortifying for the English people to read.

“If they should only be ill,” she said, “there would be so many little things we could do for them. It does seem in a kind of a way an opportunity. I often think it is only when a man is ill that he understands what a woman means in his life.”

Lois said that her own impression of a man ill was one of extreme crossness and of inability to find the nicest woman attractive at all. She pointed out that there was an excellent military hospital at Clonmore, so that they need not imagine David and Gerald tossing feverish and untended. She did not suppose they would be allowed a visit, and confessed that, for her part, she found people lying down while she stood up embarrassing; so curiously bumpy and extremely difficult to talk to.

“But if he seemed at all unlikely to recover,” said Livvy, “there would be several things I should like to say to Mr. Armstrong. If he should recover after all, he would be gentlemanly enough to forget them, though there would be no harm in their leaving a pleasant impression. To tell you the truth, Lois, I have often wondered if he does not think me a little reserved and cold. Does it ever seem to you that he looks discouraged? You see, he is accustomed to English girls who are very free; I believe there is almost nothing they will not let a man say and that they get kissed before they get engaged. Now I should not like him to think I had no heart at all. You know Irish girls in books are always made out so fascinating and heartless; I should not like him to think that of me. And if he does recover, he might go back to England and get engaged to a girl simply out of his lower nature. I should not like to feel I had spoilt a man’s life.”

“I expect,” said Lois, “it is their week for extra duty.” She thought: “If only I weren’t so certain there’d be a letter from Gerald to-morrow! If only he’d let me wonder! He is so terribly there....” If only his coming or writing could have some touch of the miracle, heal a doubt.

“Will you not stay to dinner?” she said to Livvy. “You could borrow one of my frocks.”

“I’d like that yellow taffeta, though I should have to reef it in. It’s a great inconvenience, Lois, being so slight as I am, though it does seem to be admired. Are you sure your aunt will not mind?... But no, thank you, I couldn’t; my father’d kill me for riding home after dark. In fact, I should go now,”—looking up at the sky—“one never knows, does one? Isn’t that too bad?”

“Too bad,” agreed Lois, touching her letter. She walked round to the yard with Livvy to get her horse. “But listen,” said Livvy, mounting, “there’s one thing that we had better do. We can drive in to Clonmore, Wednesday, to do some shopping: I really do need wool for a jumper. And if we should meet Mr. Smith or Captain Carmichael, I should just mention, laughingly, we hadn’t seen any of them for a long time. And then it might all come out. Or if the worst came to the worst, we could drop in to tea at the Fogartys’; if there was nobody else, there’d be bound to be Mrs. Vermont. I don’t think she’s trustworthy, but if there were anything definite she’d be bound to say—like illness, or an ambush they were not supposed to mention. Or it might all come right and the first we would meet might be Mr. Lesworth or Mr. Armstrong.... I certainly think, Lois, that is what we should do. If you can’t get your uncle’s trap, I will take my father’s.”

She rode away. Lois listened until the romantic horse-hoofs had died on the avenue, smothered in trees. This manner of Livvy’s of coming and going gave her a setting—picaresque, historical somehow. She would have been much worse if she had ridden away on a bicycle⁠— Then she took Viola’s letter out of her pocket and read it out there in the yard. Gnats danced in the underneath gloom of the chestnuts.

Viola did think Lois took feeling rather too earnestly. Lois must not grow less interesting. She admitted the little Gerald might be affecting; he was permitted to happen once. Gerald assimilated, she should be more of a woman. Only don’t lose detachment, darling; do not lose distance. Viola would be delighted if Lois would give her “Trivia.” She confessed it did startle her to be reminded that up to now she had been only eighteen by this talk of a nineteenth birthday. She felt, she said, older than the rocks among which she sat—she wrote from a rock-garden. Maurice Evans, a really ridiculous person, sat on a pink tuft of something valuable, apparently painting her. By the way, did Laurence read Pater? Maurice did not—did really anyone nowadays? Did Lois think that Viola might intrigue Laurence? Laurence continued a subject for speculation for three paragraphs. She only referred to Mr. Montmorency indirectly, and at the very end. She warned against introspection. “For introspection, darling, does make us the prey of the nice-middle-aged.” She complained there was too much introspection and tennis in Lois’s letters. “Don’t talk of yourself to that elderly man.”

Lois, relieved but chagrined by the omission, wondered if Viola really did read one’s letters at all thoroughly. She always noticed the split infinitives—one could not be sure. Lois turned in at the back door and pulled herself up to dress by the back-stairs banisters. She sniffed—duck for dinner again: it seemed the end of a cycle. This morning she had renewed the roses in Mrs. Montmorency’s room.

Crossing the ante-room, a spring in some board from her step made an unlatched door swing open. She saw Mr. Montmorency in shirt-sleeves brushing his wife’s hair. And Francie, facing the glass, saw Lois reflected, standing still in alarm on the shining floor. They smiled at each other. Mr. Montmorency, thoughtfully and heavily brushing, did not observe the interchange.