“I’ve seen a red deer too,” he said, “when I was motorcycling up to Ross this summer.”  It flashed across his mind then as it had flashed across the road then, and a thought came to him which he felt shy to speak, and then said quickly and caught in his breath at the end, “The sunset was on it.  It looked the colour of your hair.”

“Well, if it did,” she cried with sudden petulance, “pity me, that has to carry on a human head what looks natural on a wild beast’s back.  Och, come along!  Let’s run.  I like running.  I’m cold.  There’s a bonny bridge where the road dips, over the tail of Thriepmuir.  Let’s run.”  And for a hundred yards or so she ran like the red deer by his side, and then stopped for some reason that was not lack of breath.  “I don’t like this,” she said half laughingly.  “I’ve a poor envious nature.  I’m used to running everybody else off their feet, and here you’re holding back to keep with me.  I feel I’m being an object of condescension.  We’ll walk, if you please.”

Yaverland said, “Oh, what nonsense!  I was just thinking how rippingly you ran.”

“Havers!” she replied.  “You were thinking nothing of the sort.  You were wondering what for I carried an iron-monger’s shop in my pocket.  But yon rattling’s just a tin with some coconuts I’ve in it that I made last night and slipped in in case you’d like it, rubbing up against my protractor.”

“But why in Heaven’s name,” Yaverland asked, “do you carry a protractor about with you?”

“Off and on I try and keep up my Euclid and do a rider over my lunch, and I just keep a protractor handy.”

Yaverland stopped.  “Ellen,” he said, “I haven’t known you very long.”  There was the faintest knitting of her brows, and he added evenly, “I may call you Ellen, mayn’t I?  This modern comradeship between men and women....”  “Och, yes,” beamed Ellen, fascinated by the talismanic catchword, and he felt a little ashamed because he had used one of her pure enthusiasms for his own purposes.  Sometimes he was conscious of a detestable adroitness in his relations with women; it was not respectful; it was half-brother to the carneying art of the seducer, but he could not take back the insincerity.  “As I say, I haven’t known you very long.  But may I ask you a favour?”

“Surely,” said Ellen.

“Turn out your pockets.”

“But why?”

“I want to see what’s in ’em.”

“Well,” said Ellen resignedly, “there are worse vices than inquisitiveness.  Both pockets?”

“We’ll start with the one with the coconut ice and the protractor, please.”

“It’s too cold to sit by the roadside and sort them, so you’ll have to take them from me as I get them out.  Well, there’s the protractor, and there’s the coconut ice.  Have a bit?  Ah, well, I notice that grown-up—­that people older than me don’t seem to care for sweeties before their dinner.  I wonder why.  And there’s a magnetic compass I picked up on George the Fourth