But that touch which a moment ago would have set his pulses dancing affected him not at all.

He squashed the caterpillar, and as if at a signal the nightingales suddenly stopped singing. In the profound silence something stirred, a scuffling, a thump, a brief flurry among the herbage at the wood’s edge.

“What’s that?”

“Perhaps a rabbit——” he said, remembering his traps.

Again the scuffling; and Robin’s sharp eyes picked out a small circular depression in the bracken, where the fronds had been laid flat. But Virginia, astonishingly, was quicker than he was. She had run forward and was bending over the hollow place.

“Oh, Robin, Robin ! It’s a cat !”

“Take care, then,” he cried. “Don’t touch it!”

Virginia couldn’t, at first, see the trap; for the big tabby was crouching over it, pressing itself into the earth, with only its head raised to snarl at her dark figure against the sky. The soil was kicked up all round it, and there was a hot sweet smell of bruised bracken.

“Leave it to me!” said Robin sharply, as Virginia stretched out her hand towards it and the cat rose up, a spitting, snarling fury, tugging at its torn leg held between the trap’s steel jaws.

Robin said uncomfortably:

“Do go away, Virginia. I’ll deal with it. I’ll get a stick.”

“No,” she said quite calmly. “No. Take off your coat.”

The extraordinary thing was that her tone had a sort of authority; and Robin took off his coat.

“Now,” she said; and as he threw it over the cat and drew it tight about the struggling body, the astonishing girl knelt down and tried to open the trap with her fingers. It was too strong for her, but Robin with his free hand pulled the jaws apart, and Virginia lifted out the mangled leg and ran her thumb and forefinger gently along it.

“No fracture,” she said, confident and authoritative; and then Robin noticed that a whole tuft of bracken had caught in the trap as it closed, so that the jaws had not quite met. But the skin was ragged from the cat’s elbow to its paw, and there were the two ends of a severed tendon sticking out from the wound.

“Tear up a handkerchief,” Virginia commanded. Robin did so, holding the wriggling coat between his knees, and watched Virginia as she deftly bound up the cat’s leg, dividing the end of the bandage to make a small neat knot where it ended.

Her utterly unexpected competence bewildered him; it didn’t fit in with anything he knew about her. She was ineffably silly, her bead was full of film-stars, she was frightened of harmless little caterpillars, and yet in this business she was more capable than he was; for Robin could kill but he couldn’t succour, he could maim but he couldn’t mend.

“Where did you learn to do that?” he asked her; and tucking in the loose ends of the knot, she said: “V.A.D. Just at the end of the war. I rather liked it.” And indeed there were times still when the film-dream for a moment faded and she looked back upon that year in hospital as the happiest of her life. She’d never go back to it, of course; to dictatorial matrons and emptying slops and turning heavy mattresses, not she. But it was something she was glad to have done, though if anyone had asked her why she couldn’t have told them; she didn’t understand that she had liked it because when she was doing things for other people she forgot about herself.

“Now lift the coat off it and let it go,” she said. “With luck it’ll run home on three legs and its owner will look after it.”

Robin wasn’t so sure; for the tabby, he suspected, was a poacher like himself, a rabbiter, a hedgerow-hunter, perhaps a chicken-stealer. Good luck to it, he thought, as it streaked away.

He was sorry he had caught it, of course, but he didn’t trouble himself for long with uncomfortable reflections about its fear and its pain. What teased his mind at the moment was the puzzle of Virginia. Her metamorphosis had been so sudden and complete that it almost startled him.

She gave the trap a little kick with her high-heeled shoe.

“Horrid thing! Chuck it away, Robin, so that the beast who put it there can’t find it.”

Robin pulled up the peg and heaved the trap into a clump of bushes; taking good care to mark where it fell.

“And now let’s go home, please.”

They left the twilight behind them and walked back through the ride. Between the trees the night was black velvet, the still air seemed heavier somehow, Virginia had a strange fancy that she had to push her way through it. The silence was heavy too, now that the nightingales had stopped singing. The dew on the bracken soaked through Virginia’s shoes and there were queer damp smells everywhere, some sweet, some sharp. Virginia walked close to Robin, for she didn’t like woods even in daylight and dreaded them in the dark, erroneously imagining them to be populated by adders.

Nevertheless, she felt pleased with herself. It had been nice to be able to save the cat (although as a matter of fact, she wasn’t very fond of cats) and she was glad that she had tied up its leg so swiftly and neatly. She was rather good at that sort of thing; and she remembered with pleasure the grudging praise of a horse-faced old matron when she had completed a difficult dressing: “You may be a fool, Smith, but you’ve got quick fingers.” Nurse Smith! It sounded funny now. It might come in useful for publicity, she thought; the kind of publicity they gave to starlets when they were building them up into stars. “At the age of seventeen Virginia Vance, undreaming of her bright future, was making beds in a military hospital.