“I wasn’t talking about anything.  You were talking about the moon.”

“It was the moon that did it.”

“I suppose it was the moon.”

“I see.  I bored you.  How awful.”

“I didn’t say you bored me.  You never have bored me.  You couldn’t bore me.”

“No—­I just irritate you and drive you mad.”

“You just irritate me and drive me mad.”

The words were brutal but the voice caressed her.  He took her by the arm and steered her amicably round a hidden boulder.

“Do you know many women?” she asked.

The question was startling by reason of its context.  The better to consider it Rowcliffe withdrew his protecting arm.

“No,” he said, “not very many.”

“But those you do know you get on with?  You get on all right with Mary?”

“Yes.  I get on all right with ‘Mary.’”

“You’d be horrid if you didn’t.  Mary’s a dear.”

“Well—­I know where I am with her.”

“And you get on all right—­really—­with Papa, as long as I’m not there.”

“As long as you’re not there, yes.”

“So that,” she pursued, “I’m the horrid thing that’s happened to you?  It looks like it.”

“It feels like it.  Let’s say you’re the horrid thing that’s happened to me, and leave it at that.”

They left it.

Rowcliffe had a sort of impression that he had said all that he had had to say.

XXXII

The Vicar had called Gwenda into his study one day.

“What’s this I hear,” he said, “of you and young Rowcliffe scampering about all over the country?”

The Vicar had drawn a bow at a venture.  He had not really heard anything, but he had seen something; two forms scrambling hand in hand up Karva; not too distant to be recognisable as young Rowcliffe and his daughter Gwenda, yet too distant to be pleasing to the Vicar.  It was their distance that made them so improper.

“I don’t know, Papa,” said Gwenda.

“Perhaps you know what was said about your sister Alice?  Do you want the same thing to be said about you?”

“It won’t be, Papa.  Unless you say it yourself.”

She had him there; for what was said about Alice had been said first of all by him.

“What do you mean, Gwenda?”

“I mean that I’m a little different from Alice.”

“Are you? Are you?  When you’re doing the same thing?”

“Let me see.  What was the dreadful thing that Ally did?  She ran after young Rickards, didn’t she?  Well—­if you’d really seen us scampering you’d know that I’m generally running away from young Rowcliffe and that young Rowcliffe is generally running after me.  He says it’s as much as he can do to keep up with me.”

“Gwenda,” said the Vicar solemnly.  “I won’t have it.”

“How do you propose to stop it, Papa?”