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was a lovely day. I got turned round, looking about the trees in a way that excluded him. I am not without training in this business! Then sideways I gave him the cool nod of farewell and, taking the middle of the narrow path where no-one could walk beside me, I began strolling back.
    He was walking behind me. I became terribly conscious of him and angry. I had to suppose there was no real reason why he should not walk behind me if he was going my way. But at least he might have kept farther from my heels. This was hardly a bus-stop. Unfortunately my physical strength wasn’t enough to keep this mood and myself going. So I stopped on the inner edge of the path, looking with private interest up the hillside so that he might pass. Shall I get them for you? he asked. I did not know what he meant. Before I could look at him coldly, he climbed up and plucked some bluebells (harebells to you). This was excruciating. I walked on. He started down upon me and presented the bluebells. His brown eyes had glints in them. No thanks, I said, please keep them for yourself. And I said it in such a way as left no doubt I meant him to keep to himself. He laughed—not loudly but with a horrible sort of understanding. Men with his eyes have that sort of understanding of women. The laugh was not horrible, it was, what is so much more horrible, delicious. I went hot. I felt my face burn. I had the absurd but paralysing notion that he was going to spring on me. He was gathering himself. His right hand came up and across his breast. The seam under his shoulder was burst for three inches. As his face followed his hand I saw a red streak on his neck—a flesh wound. He stuck the bluebells in his button-hole and looked at me from under his eyebrows.
    I went on, I hardly know how. It would be quite impossible to give you any idea of the state I was in. The sight of the wound had made me think of the murderer. I could not look round. Had I looked round and found him following me, I would have screamed and collapsed gibbering.
    I think the worst spot was just after I got out of the wood and knew he was not following me. But I didn’t run. Then the tremors and trembles so came on me that it was like being drunk and you can’t keep going any more. But I kept going because to stop now, to sit down, would be to invite him, to cry to him. And the wood was still holding him, but only just.
    At last I got so far that what held me to the wood snapped like an elastic and I fell. How the earth took me, like rain! To sink in—ah, Ranald, it’s lovely. I wish I could tell you. Perhaps—some day.
    Light in body, and light in the head too, there I was leaving the moor and coming towards our Wood (yours and mine though you’ve never been there). I thought of the Mound, the juniper bushes, the bank that breathes of the warm south. There I would rest. For I hadn’t rested long on the moor. And now the pine trees are at hand and I am looking for the sagging place in the old wire fence that you step over. And then—one of the tree trunks moved. Buttons on a blue tunic. A body. It was a policeman. The policeman looked at me. I was staring at his eyes. I knew the eyes. They were grey like thistledown.
    I can only believe I was so bereft of sense and motion that I looked merely astounded. Anyway I stood on nothing, staring at him. A curious hard glimmer came into his face, oddly selfconscious. He was like one caught playing a queer part in an unexpected place. He said good day and I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. And then, Ranald, he asked me: Did you see anyone about?
    Oh I knew instantly, overwhelmingly, what he meant. It went crying through me, through the world. My brows gathered. Anyone? I repeated. No.
    Before such bewildered innocence he shifted on his feet. He could not have seen me, could not have seen what happened in the trees of the gorge. He could not see the gorge from here, not until he went nearly a mile onto the