“Darling, you used to say Colin was your favourite.”

“No, my dear.  Never.  Never.  It was always Jerrold.  Ever since he was born.  He never cried when he was a baby.  Colin was always crying.”

“Poor Col-Col.”

“There you are.  Nobody’ll ever say, ‘Poor Jerrold’.  I like happy people, Anne.  In this tiresome world it’s people’s duty to be happy.”

“If it was, would they be?  Don’t look at me as if I wasn’t.”

“I wasn’t thinking of you, ducky...  You might tell Pinkney to take all those tea-things off the terrace and put them back into the lounge.”

ii

The beech-trees stood in a half ring at the top of the highest field.  Jerrold had come back.  He and Anne sat in the bay of the beeches, looking out over the hills.

Curve after curve of many-coloured hills, rolling together, flung off from each other, an endless undulation.  Rounded heads carrying a clump of trees like a comb; long steep groins packed with tree-tops; raking necks hog-maned with stiff plantations.  Slopes that spread out fan-wise, opened wide wings.  An immense stretching and flattening of arcs up to the straight blue wall on the horizon.  A band of trees stood up there like a hedge.

Calm, clean spaces emerging, the bright, sharp-cut pattern of the fields; squares and fans and pointed triangles, close fitted; emerald green of the turnips; yellow of the charlock lifted high and clear; red brown and pink and purple of ploughed land and fallows; red gold of the wheat and white green of the barley; shimmering in a wash of thin air.

Where Anne and Jerrold sat, green pastures, bitten smooth by the sheep, flowed down below them in long ridges like waves.  On the right the bright canary coloured charlock brimmed the field.  Its flat, vanilla and almond scent came to them.

“What’s Yorkshire like?”

“Not a patch on this place.  I can’t think what there is about it that makes you feel so jolly happy.”

“But you’d always be happy, Jerrold, anywhere.”

“Not like that.  I mean a queer, uncanny feeling that you sort of can’t make out.”

“I know.  I know...  There’s nothing on earth that gets you like the smell of charlock.”

Anne tilted up her nose and sniffed delicately.

“Fancy seeing this country suddenly for the first time,” he said.

“There’s such a lot of it.  You wouldn’t see it properly.  It takes ages just to tell one hill from another.”

He looked at her.  She could feel him meditating, considering.

“I say, I wonder what it would feel like seeing each other for the first time.”

“Not half so nice as seeing each other now.  Why, we shouldn’t remember any of the jolly things we’ve done:  together.”

He had seen Maisie Durham for the first time.  She wondered whether that had made him think of it.

“No, but the effect might be rather stunning—­I mean of seeing you.”