Looking up at the honeysuckle-buried window of the bedroom of Gerda, Neville nearly whistled the call to which Gerda was wont to reply.  Nearly, but not quite.  On the whole it was a morning to be out alone in.  Besides, Neville wanted to forget, for the moment, about birthdays, and Gerda would have reminded her.

Going round by the yard, she fetched Esau instead, who wouldn’t remind her, and whose hysterical joy she hushed with a warning hand.

Across the wet and silver lawn she sauntered, between the monstrous shadows of the elms, her feet in the old sand shoes leaving dark prints in the dew, her mouth full of bread and marmalade, her black plait bobbing on her shoulders, and Esau tumbling round her.  Across the lawn to the wood, cool and dim still, but not quiet, for it rang with music and rustled with life.  Through the boughs of beeches and elms and firs the young day flickered gold, so that the bluebell patches were half lit, like blue water in the sun, half grey, like water at twilight.  Between two great waves of them a brown path ran steeply down to a deep little stream.  Neville and Esau, scrambling a little way upstream, stopped at a broad swirling pool it made between rocks.  Here Neville removed coat, shoes and pyjamas and sat poised for a moment on the jutting rock, a slight and naked body, long in the leg, finely and supplely knit, with light, flexible muscles—­a body built for swiftness, grace and a certain wiry strength.  She sat there while she twisted her black plait round her head, then she slipped into the cold, clear, swirling pool, which in one part was just over her depth, and called to Esau to come in too, and Esau, as usual, didn’t, but only barked.

One swim round is enough, if not too much, as everyone who knows sunrise bathing will agree.  Neville scrambled out, discovered that she had forgotten the towel, dried herself on her coat, resumed her pyjamas, and sat down to eat her second slice of bread and marmalade.  When she had finished it she climbed a beech tree, swarming neatly up the smooth trunk in order to get into the sunshine, and sat on a broad branch astride, whistling shrilly, trying to catch the tune now from one bird, now from another.

These, of course, were the moments when being alive was enough.  Swimming, bread and marmalade, sitting high in a beech tree in the golden eye of the morning sun—­that was life.  One flew then, like a gay ship with the wind in its sails, over the cold black bottomless waters of misgiving.  Many such a June morning Neville remembered in the past....  She wondered if Gerda and if Kay thus sailed over sorrow, too.  Rodney, she knew, did.  But she knew Rodney better, in some ways, than she knew Gerda and Kay.