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had taken care to wear her wedding ring. Shewas imagining him shocked by what Mr Gillman said, leaving without a word, returning to the pet shop and alone there ever since, brooding on his disappointment and her treachery. But why should he have reacted like that? How did she know it had been like that? She could hardly ask Mr Gillman. Nick might have laughed when Mr Gillman told him — ‘I didn’t know she was married’ or even, ‘Married, is she? Just my luck.’ Come to that, he might have been relieved. He might have thought he had said too much on Friday, buying the umbrella specially and walking arm in arm with her, and be afraid she would think he had meant more than he had. Why couldn’t she believe that and stop thinking about it?
    ‘Mr Gillman’s ready for you now,’ she said to the older of the women, and helped her gently into the consulting room.
    Of course it couldn’t be that Nick had been relieved. In calling at Gillman’s at all, he must have been coming to ask her to go out with him. The idea burst into her mind, a sudden radiant solution, that she could rush along to the pet shop at lunchtime and apologize, ask him to forgive her and make everything all right. Just as swiftly, she saw that this was absurd. How could she apologize to a man for being married to someone else? And even supposing she did, what then? Could she unmarry herself? Make Stephen vanish? And for what? To go to the cinema with Nick Frazer?
    She
could
unmarry herself. She could have done that any time these past four years. It would only have taken a word and the simple, undeniable proof. She had often thought of it and each time she did Stephen’s face came before her eyes, as clear as some mystic’s vision, the most vulnerable face she had ever seen, the face of a brave child.
    * * *
    It was cloudy for most of the day of 30 April but the sky cleared in the late afternoon and by five the sun shone out boldly. At about half past six Stephen set out to take the crinkle-crankle path up the fell, the way he had brought the policemen three weeks before. Never, since he was a child, had he missed coming up to the Foinmen on Beltane.
    There was little enough to see, of course. On 29 April and 1 May the setting sun’s rays were scarcely differently placed, but an ancient tradition attached to the eve of May Day. The rays, just as the red orb of the sun sank beneath the slope of Ringer’s Foin, touched the very centre of the Altar. Long ago, thousands of years ago perhaps, a rune had been carved in the centre of the broad flat stone, and the faint marks which still remained indicated that the rune had been in the shape the shadows of the Foinmen made at sunset. No doubt some very holy ceremony had once taken place there on Beltane. Stephen liked to stand and watch, to imagine the druidical forms as they must have been, going about their ritual, and to wait in silence and stillness for the sun to perform his precise function.
    It had not always been possible for him to observe the phenomenon on his own. Others often came to watch too. Once there had even been a party of tourists, disturbing the peace with their groans and giggles as they struggled up the steep path from their coach. On sunless Beltanes he had invariably found himself alone there, but never on such a glorious evening as this. Nevertheless, he had met no one, could see no one on the whole spread of Foinmen’s Plain. In the past days people had begun cautiously to return to the moor, but not this evening and not here.
    It was much warmer than on that last visit and warmer than last year. There was scarcely a breath ofwind. The stones threw long, flaring shadows that suggested the shape of some ancient harp, only lengthening imperceptibly as the sun’s angle grew more oblique. Great towering clouds were massing behind Big Allen but to the west the sky was as clear as the inside of a mother-of-pearl-lined shell, of a pale, tender, pinstained azure. A flock of birds flew