Night after night, between eleven and midnight, he came to her.  Night after night, she lay awake waiting till the light rustling of the meadow grass told her he was there:  on moonlit nights a quick brushing sound; in the thick blackness a sound like a slow shearing as he felt his way.  The moon would show him clear, as he stood in the open frame of the shelter, looking in at her; or she would see him grey, twilit and mysterious; or looming, darker than dark, on black nights without moon or stars.

They loved the clear nights when their bodies showed to each other white under the white moon; they loved the dark nights that brought them close, shutting them in, annihilating every sensation but that of his tense, hard muscles pressing down, of her body crushed and yielding, tightening and slackening in surrender; of their brains swimming in their dark ecstasy.

They loved the warmth of each other’s bodies in the hot windless nights; they loved their smooth, clean coolness washed by the night wind.  Nothing, not even the sweet, haunting ghost of Maisie, came between.  They would fall asleep in each other’s arms and lie there till dawn, till Anne woke in a sudden fright.  Always she had this fear that some day they would sleep on into the morning, when the farm people would be up and about.  Jerrold lay still, tired out with satisfaction, sunk under all the floors of sleep.  She had to drag him up, with kisses first and light stroking, then with a strong undoing of their embrace, pushing back his heavy arms that fell again to her breast as she parted them.  Then she would wrench herself loose and shake him by the shoulders till she woke him.  He woke clean, with no ugly turning and yawning, but with a great stretching of his strong body and a short, sudden laugh, the laugh he had for danger.  Then he would look at his wrist watch and show it her, laughing again as she saw that this time, again, they were safe.  And they would lie a little while longer, looking into each other’s faces for the sheer joy of looking, reckless with impunity.  And he would start up suddenly with, “I say, Anne, I must clear out or we shall be caught.”  And they would get up.

Outside, the world looked young and unknown in the June dawn, in the still, clear, gold-crystal air, where green leaves and green grass shone with a strange, hard lustre like fresh paint, and yet unearthly, uncreated, fixed in their own space and time.

And she would go with him, her naked feet shining white on the queer, bright, cold green of the grass, up the field to the belt of firs that stood up, strange and eternal, under the risen sun.

They parted there, holding each other for a last kiss, a last clinging, as if never in this world they would meet again.

Dawn after dawn.  They belonged to the dawn and the dawn light; the dawn was their day; they knew it as they knew no other time.

And Anne would go back to her shelter, and lie there, and live through their passion again in memory, till she fell asleep.