“Photographers and painters aren’t interested in the same thing. Anyhow, I’m not drawing your face.”

“Then what are you doing?” asked Virginia reasonably; for she had been sitting for half an hour in a most uncomfortable attitude on a sort of nursery-rhyme tuffet at the top of the hill. Short sharp grasses prickled her behind, and all manner of poisonous insects, she was sure, were crawling up her legs.

“I’m taking notes,” Robin said. “I’m getting Inspiration. I can’t design you a dress without Inspiration. At the moment I’m seeing you in white draped chiffon; or maize taffeta, just off the shoulder, I’m not quite sure which. Sit still and look at that sunset.”

It was as if the gods had lit a bonfire behind the black hills away to the westward. Out of the crimson heart of the blaze shot orange streamers, teased-out witches’ brooms, curly unfolding fronds of flame, pink tendrils climbing into the duck-egg blue. High above the whole conflagration hung a huge dove-grey cloud like a mushroom of smoke.

This cloud cast a long shadow over the Bloody Meadow with its skeleton grandstand, but the town beyond lay in a pool of the softest pink light, the roofs of the houses and the tall Abbey tower were rosy-flushed above a shimmering river-mist, so that the place did not seem to belong to the English countryside at all, but to the fabulous East; it was Bokhara, Tashkent, Samarkand.

“Turner’s sunsets,” said Robin, “were wishy-washy to this one.”

But Virginia was not looking at the sunset; the stupendous bonfire burned for her in vain. She was thinking that perhaps she had been unwise to trust herself on the hill with Robin, and that even the scandalous studio might have been safer, and would certainly have been more comfortable, than this anthill or whatever it was with its population of creepy-crawlies. She was not sure that she liked Robin’s manner, which was brusque and domineering, nor his preoccupation with birds, which bored her; she had not the slightest ambition to listen to a nightingale. On the other hand, she had to admit that his merry brown face was attractive—it was rather like a nice monkey’s when he grinned, and she liked his clear blue eyes which had little crinkles at the edges of them, and the touch of his strong hands when he helped her over stiles. And although she didn’t approve of fighting with fists, which she thought was not very refined, she could hardly be indifferent to the fact that Robin and Lance had come to blows on her behalf. She had read in the paper about a French film-star whose admirers had fought a duel with pistols or rapiers, she couldn’t remember which; and that was romantic indeed. Robin’s swollen lip was less so, but it was not so bad as Lance’s black eye. Presumably Robin had won, otherwise she supposed Lance would have invited her to walk on the hill and listen to the nightingales. The only thing which puzzled her was the continued friendship of the two young men. She had seen them coming out of the pub together only this morning, arm-in-arm. It was quite true what her best girl-friend often said to her, the one she went to the pictures with twice a week: You never knew where you were with Boys.

“And now,” said Robin, putting away his pencil, “those nightingales will be just about piping up at the edge of the birch-brake. Come along.”

“Can’t I see your drawing?” she temporised.

“No, it’s only a lot of squiggles. You wouldn’t make head or tail of it.” He slipped the sketching-block into his big pocket and got up.

“The long grass will be all wet with dew,” she said.

“Do your feet good. Milkmaids used to bathe their faces in it, for the sake of their complexions. Come along, Virgie.”

“Ay wish you wouldn’t call me Virgie,” she said in the mincing tones she always used to repel advances, “it doesn’t sound nace somehow.”

She got up and brushed a lot of imaginary insects from her skirt. Robin set off at a great pace up the hill, and she nearly had to run to keep up with him. The little bracken-fronds, rough as a coarse blanket, tickled and scratched her bare legs. Tiny green caterpillars, suspended from the birch branches on invisible threads, waylaid her just at eye-level, and when she put her hand to her face she found one of them wriggling upon her nose.

Robin stopped suddenly.

“Listen!” he said.

She could hear a very faint trilling sound, uttered, it seemed, by something as breathless as herself.

“Is that the nightingale?”

“Of course not; grasshopper warbler. The first I’ve ever heard here. Rather exciting!”

Virginia didn’t think the indistinct chirrup was in the least exciting; but Robin stood stock-still, with his head on one side, obviously fascinated by it.

“You’re blowing like a grampus,” he said. “It’s all that sitting in the pictures. Bad for your wind.