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and watchful. All the time there, though you didn’t know it, under the leaves. The shock, the recoil!’
    ‘Did this ever actually happen?’ Liz asked with interest.
    ‘I imagine it must have. I have the sensation of it, the quick tinkling of fear in my wrists, when I describe it.’
    ‘I think toads are beautiful, anyhow,’ Liz said, and she stood up, steadying herself until the bus stopped.
    In the lane, the cool air flowed between the hedges, almost as if it were a visible thing, like smoke, or water.
    ‘There! She is at it!’ Liz said as they came near the cottage. ‘The loud pedal down and simply hammering. She is getting fierce in her old age, and she will wake Harry and frighten him.’
    She hastened up the path and Camilla followed her slowly, breathing very deeply the hay-scented air and feeling moths brush by her towards the lamplit window.
    ‘I see you have made yourself at home,’ Camilla said, pushing all Liz’s spread-out jars and brushes to one side of the dressing-table and laying about some of her own.
    The windows opened into the branches of a pear tree, a beautiful thing, they supposed, in the spring when they never saw it; but now darkly-leaved and throwing a green darkness into the bedroom. Birds burst in and out of its boughs and small crowned pears dropped into the grass below.
    Camilla, having asserted herself over the dressing-table, now turned her attention to the darkening garden. Behind her, back in the shadows of the room, Liz sat on a low chair and fed the baby, who, full and contented, turned from her breast and flung out an arm, his eyes wandering, milky dribble running from a corner of his mouth.
    When Camilla faced the room again, as she must sooner or later, she thought (since the strangeness with Liz was binding her into intolerable confines), Liz put the baby up against her shoulder and smoothed his back, her other shoulder, her veined bosom half-bare in her opened frock, her hair hanging loose against her cheek. The baby’s head bobbed weakly, he belched twice softly and once more the milk ran from his mouth, down Liz’s back.
    ‘Surely he has had too much,’ Camilla suggested, and she came across the room and dabbed at Liz’s blouse with a handkerchief.
    ‘Take him!’ said Liz, jerking her shoulder back into her clothes, casting round for pins and napkins.
    Camilla had taken the baby and held him awkwardly against her. This awkwardness, this hesitation, he at once sensed, and began to stiffen himself and to arch his back. In his struggles, he pressed his wet and opened mouth to her face, and she recoiled a little.
    ‘He is the first baby I have ever held,’ she said, ‘I do it badly.’
    Liz reached forward and took him. When he was pinned into his napkins she carried him away to his cot.
    Camilla was in bed when Liz came back, lying with her arms crossed under her head, looking reflective. ‘You will have to leave that man,’ she said so suddenly that Liz was arrested with her petticoat half over her head. When she was clear, she said in a flustered way: ‘He isn’t bad enough for that. He doesn’t do anything wrong, you know.’
    ‘He will turn you into someone like himself.’
    ‘It must always give a woman a queer feeling when her husband is called “that man”.’
    ‘He is that to me,’ Camilla said simply. ‘I cannot call clergymen by their Christian names.’
    ‘It should seem an easy thing to do.’
    ‘I wonder why he became one?’ Camilla yawned.
    The beauty of his voice,’ Liz said coldly, pottering about at the dressing-table.
    ‘I have been feeling we were poles apart.’
    ‘I know. It was nothing I could avoid.’
    ‘I was jealous of the baby.’ She exposed the truth, feeling so much depended on making this effort, but at once clouded her words with a laugh. The idea was not illuminated for long enough to show itself to Liz, who got into bed, still thinking of her husband.
    ‘He will write to me, I suppose,’ she said as she tucked