Her eyes flashed their ready challenge.  “Life being too short already?” she suggested.

“Even so,” said Charles Rex coolly.

Toby abruptly bent her head and muttered something into the picnic-basket.

“What?” said Saltash.

She pulled out a parcel of cakes and tossed them on to the ground.  “Nothing!” she said.

He leaned forward unexpectedly as she foraged for more, and gripped the small brown hand.

“Tell me what you said!” he commanded.

She flung him a look half-frightened, half-daring.  “I said there was only one cup.”

She would have released her hand with the words, but his fingers tightened like a spring. “Pardonnez-moi! That was not what you said!”

She became passive in his hold, but she said nothing.

“Tell me what you said!” Saltash said again.

A little tremor went through Toby.  “Can we do—­with only one cup?” she asked, not looking at him, her eyelids flickering nervously.

“Going to answer me?” said Saltash.

She shook her head and was silent.

He waited for perhaps ten seconds, and in that time a variety of different expressions showed and vanished on his ugly face.  Then, just as Toby was beginning to tremble in real trepidation, he suddenly set her free.

“We have drunk out of the same glass before now,” he said.  “We can do it again.”

She looked at him then, relief and doubt struggling together in her eyes.  “Are you angry?” she said.

His answering look baffled her.  “No,” he said.

She laid a conciliatory hand upon his arm.  “You are!  I’m sure you are!”

“I am not,” said Saltash.

“Then why aren’t you?” demanded Toby, with sudden spirit.

The monkeyish grin leapt into his face.  “Because I know what you said,” he told her coolly.  “It is not easy—­you will never find it easy—­to deceive me.”

She snatched her hand away.  Her face was on fire.  “I said you did not make the most of life,” she flung at him.  “And it’s true!  You don’t!  You don’t!”

“How do you know that?” said Saltash.

She did not answer him.  Her head was bent over the basket.  She threw out one thing after another with nervous rapidity, and once, as he watched her, there came a faint sound that was like a hastily suppressed sob.

Saltash got to his feet with disconcerting suddenness and walked away.

When he returned some minutes later with a half-smoked cigarette between his lips, she was sitting demurely awaiting him, the picnic ready spread.

He scarcely looked at her but he flicked her cheek as he sat down, and in a moment she turned and smiled at him.

“I have found another cup,” she said.

“So I see,” said Saltash, and before she could realize his mood he picked it up and flung it at the trunk of a tree some yards away.  It shivered in fragments on the moss, and Toby gasped and stared at him wide-eyed.