…”

They walked arm-in-arm, and Robin, feeling her so close to him, wondered whether he’d been wrong about her after all. She’d been so sensible about that cat, so competent and yet quite unsentimental, she hadn’t cried about it and made a fuss as some girls would—perhaps, then, she wasn’t such a silly floosie as he’d thought? And if so, perhaps he’d been wrong about other things too. Perhaps she wasn’t, as he’d imagined, one of those Take-your-hand-away-or-I’ll-scream girls.

He put his arm about her tentatively, and she made no protest. Indeed for a moment a little flicker of warmth was engendered between them. Virginia saw the last of the sunset breaking through the tracery of branches at the end of the ride, and felt quite safe at last. She even dared to lean her head on Robin’s shoulder as lovers sometimes did on the pictures: a position, she discovered, of acute discomfort when one is walking.

Perhaps at that moment Robin’s little seedling of affection might have taken root; perhaps the fading plant did quicken—but not for long. She said suddenly:

“Do you like Virginia Vance?”

“I don’t know her,” said Robin, genuinely surprised.

“I mean the name, silly.”

“Well, who is she?”

“Me. I thought of Virginia Valley,” she explained patiently, with her head at an angle of forty-five degrees, “and Verity and Virtue and Vane. If I get that film-test, you see, I can’t be just Smith. Virginia what?”

“Stock,” said Robin automatically; “or creeper.” But she didn’t see the joke. “Stock? Creeper?” she repeated, puzzled. “I think those are very ugly names. Honestly, Robin, don’t you think ‘Virginia Vance’ sounds pretty?”

So it had only been a flash in the pan after all, he said to himself; she really was as dumb as she seemed, as dumb as he had dismally anticipated, after that silly fight with Lance when they had got drunk and quarrelled so absurdly over the Beauty Queens. …

Robin vaulted the gate and Virginia climbed over it clumsily, getting her shoe as usual caught in the bar. The dying sunset lay before them, a long streak of orange low in the dark sky. The lights of the town were beginning to stipple the pewter-coloured river.

“Thenk you for the natingales,” said Virginia primly, coming up to his side. “And Robin—”

“Yes?”

“It was awfully naughty of you and Lance but it was nace of you to—to fate for me.”

Robin didn’t say anything. She couldn’t guess, the silly little floosie, that they had fought about Edna; and that when they had made it up afterwards, solemnly shaking hands in a ridiculous welter of English sportsmanship, they had decided to toss up for the Beauty Queens; and that Lance, alas, had won.

Less than two hundred yards away, as it happened, Lance and Edna had made for themselves a couch among the bracken, which had begun as a very small one, a mere dimple on the hillside just big enough for two, but had unaccountably extended itself to cover an area of many square yards. They had been much too preoccupied with each other to notice the nightingales; but within their private battlefield, hidden from the world, they now lay at peace.

“You know when Joe dips the balloons in the paint?” said Edna; and indeed Lance did know, for he had called for her just before seven at the factory and had been not a little embarrassed to find himself in the company of nearly a dozen young men who were also waiting for their girls: a lengthening queue. It had occurred to him that it would be extremely awkward if his father came along, on his way perhaps from visiting the sick; so he had made the excuse to John Handiman that he would like to see over the factory and had taken refuge there until the day-shift came off duty. Thus he had watched Edna putting the squeals into a score of pigs and inflating them until they swelled like uberous sows, deep-bellied, huge-hammed, luxuriantly fecund. Ripeness is all.

“And you know how the balloons come out all the colours of the rainbow?” she went on. “Red and yellow and green all mixed up together?” She giggled delightfully. “Your eye’s rather like that.”

Lance watched the stars coming out, and heard a little breeze sigh through the ferns, and smelt the queer bruised-bracken smell, thinking that he would remember it for the rest of his life. His head was full of tenuous rhymes, and words came from nowhere like the wind in the bracken and whispered through it. Violet-weaving, shimmering-throned Aphrodite, he said to himself. (He had been reading Sappho.) He felt so happy that he was sure, if only he had a pencil and paper, he could have written the saddest poem in the world.

Edna stretched herself like a contented kitten, and let the tip of her finger rest lightly on Lance’s swollen temple.

“Poor eye,” she said. “And I’m sorry for Robin too. But I’m glad you beat him, Lance.”

IV

Faith Pargetter, the farmer’s daughter, had been properly brought up in one of those big, gracious farmhouses “where all’s accustomed, ceremonious.” In the spotless kitchen with its stone-flagged floor there were never less than two sides of bacon slung high above the chimney-piece, and two treacle-cured hams, spiced with juniper berries, in pickle for Christmas. The shining pots and pans and the dull-gleaming coppers which hung upon the walls were of a size which spoke of generous hospitality.