had ever known.  And yet it was utterly beyond him to speak the necessary words.  And the army of winds passed down to the plains and there was stillness, the trunks of the trees ceased to groan and the dead leaves did not race among their feet, and she shook back her hair and was no longer a woman.  She leaned towards him and spoke rapidly, reverting to the subject of women soldiers, and unquestionably the spirit of childhood lodged upon her lips.

Granted that there was such a thing as future life, though, mind you, she found the evidence in support of it miserably weak, did he not think that the canonisation of Joan of Arc must have been a terrible smack in the face for St. Paul?  He made himself forget in laughter the priceless moment that had passed, and he told himself, as sternly as once in South America he had had to tell himself that he must stop drinking, that her mother had been right, and he must not make love to her because she was too young.

There was a curious colour of relief about this decision, and it was with a kind of gusto that he kept repeating it to himself all the long way that spread about before them after they passed Bavelaw Castle, the whitewashed farmhouse that was the anti-climax of the avenue.  Two servant-girls were laying clothes on a bleaching-green within its dykes, the one taking them down from a clothes-line, the other laying them down on the grass, and they were exchanging cries that seemed at that distance wordless expressions of simple being like the calls of the whaups that circled above them.  Here was a district remote from all human complexity, in which it was very sweet to walk with this young girl.

The road stopped, for this was no place where the marketing could spin along to any business, and two grassy tracks went forward, both marked by bare, uninscribed posts, as if they led to destinations too unvisited to need a name.  The one they did not take climbed over the grey shoulder of the range, and the other brought them into an eastward valley where there was for the moment no wind and a serenity that was surely perpetual.  The cries of the hill-birds did but drill little holes in the clear hemisphere of silence that lay over this place.  The slopes on either side, thickly covered with mats of heather and bristling mountain herbage, and yet lean and rocky, were like the furry sides of emaciated animals, and up above bare black summits confronted the sky.  It was the extremity of bleak beauty.  And, unafraid of the grimness, Ellen ran on ahead, her arms crooked back funnily because she had her hands in her pocket to keep the coconut-ice tin from rattling against the protractor, her red hair streaming a yard behind.  He absorbed the sight of her so greedily that it immediately seemed as if it were a recollected sight over which he had pondered and felt tenderness for many years, and he wondered if perhaps he had seen someone like her before.  But of course he never had.  There was no one in the world like her.