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rea l ladies, the beautiful ladies?’ 'They were - in circulation. But I found none to my taste.' 'You tasted them?'
    'Only by the eye. And that generally at a distance.' 'It seems you've been a monk,'
    'Only because you are more beautiful than all of them.'
    'Oh, Ross,' she said weakly, 'I do so hate you! I hate you for lying to me ! Say if you wish that you want me to be a wife to you again. That I will be. But don't - pretend.'
    'If I were to pretend you might take it for the truth - but because it's the truth you disbelieve me, eh, is that it?'
    She shrugged but did not speak.
    He said: 'Oh, in a picture gallery I cannot say that three out of five men would not pick a different picture from mine. It is not just looks, it is what's behind 'em; it's the familiarity of knowing someone intimately and yet wanting them all over again; it's the total commitment of personality; it's the ultimate spark between two people that lights the flame , But who knows whether it will warm them or burn them up?' He stopped and frowned at her. 'I had no idea when I came home how we were to meet, I have no idea at this moment whether we shall ever laugh together again - in that way. I want you, I want you, but there's anger and jealousy in it still, and they the hard, I can't say more. I can't promise that tomorrow it will be like this between us or like that. Nor can you, I'm sure. You're right in saying I'm a stranger. But I'm a stranger who knows every inch of your skin. We have to go on from there - in a sense to start again.'

II
    Ross was up at four next morning. He left Demelza, her breath ticking gently like a metronome, went out of the bedroom and down the stairs. Day was breaking outside, but the dark hadn't yet left the house; it skulked in corners waiting to trip you up.
    He went out and stood under the shadowy lilac tree listening to the sleepy chirp of the finches and the sparrows. Somewhere up the lane a blackbird was in full song among the nut trees, but about the house they had been slow to wake. The air was white and pure and soft and he inhaled it like ether. Then he slid round the house while a cow lowed at him and a pig grunted, climbed the stile and was on the beach, sand soft and churning at first, then hard where the tide had been.
    It was not yet far out. The waves were small but explosive, bursting into little flurries of self-importance as they turned. He threw off his robe, kicked his slippers away and went in. The sea was like a surgeon, icy and probing: although it was mid-May his body froze before it responded to stimulus. So for five minutes, and then he was out again, breathless but glowing, as if his flesh was made new. He wrapped himself in his robe as the rim of the sun peered slanting over the sandhills and set fire to the first chimney top of Nampara.
    Reminiscent mood - he had swum like this after his night with the woman Margaret following the bail in Truro, and the day before he first met Deme lza. He had swum then as if to rid himself of some miasma attaching to the night. Not so this time. No expense of spirit in a waste of shame. A trivial event, of course, for God's sake: he had resumed intercourse with his wife, for God's sake. Fit subject for ribald dialogue in one of the fashionable plays in London.
    Yet it hadn't quite turned out as expected. What would one have expected? In spite of his brave words, perhaps the casual. Or more likely the fiercely resentful, a claiming of a right long since in abeyance and nearly lost. But in the event it had never progressed beyond the tender. Somehow a much-derided emotion had got in the way and turned it all to kindness. Whatever happened now, however they met today, or tomorrow, in whatever form constraint or hurt or injury or resentment reared its head, he must remember that. As she would, he knew. If only one could altogether exorcise the ghosts.
    When he got back to tire house all were still sleeping, though the Gimletts and the rest of the servants would