He took your hand. You ran faster and faster. You stood together, under the ash tree, panting, and laughing, safe. He still held your hand. Funny that you should remember it when you hadn't noticed it at the time. Hands were funny things. His hand had felt like Mark's hand, or Roddy's. You didn't think of it as belonging to him. It made you want to have Mark and Roddy back again. To play with them. Perhaps, after all, it wouldn't be kind to tell Maurice about the tennis party. He couldn't have played like that. He couldn't have scrambled up the water-butt and run with you along the scullery roof. "My dearest Maurice: Nothing has happened since you left, except that there was a tennis party at the Vicarage yesterday. You know what tennis parties are like. You'll be shocked to hear that I wore my old black jersey--the one you hated so--" IX. "'Mein Kind, wir waren Kinder.'" She shut her eyes. She wanted nothing but his voice. His voice was alive. It remembered. It hadn't grown old and tired. "My child, we once were children, two children happy and small; we crept in the little hen-house and hid ourselves under the straw." "Kikeriküh! sie glaubten Es wäre Hahnen geschrei." "...It's all very well, Mary, I can't go on reading Heine to you for ever. And--_après_?" He had taken her on his knees. That happened sometimes. She kept one foot on the floor so as not to press on him with her whole weight. And she played with his watch chain. She liked to touch the things he wore. It made her feel that she cared for him; it staved off the creeping, sickening fear that came when their hands and faces touched. "Do you know," he said, "what it will be like--afterwards?" She began, slowly, to count the buttons of his waistcoat. "Have you ever tried to think what it will be like?" "Yes." Last night, lying awake in the dark, she had tried to think. She had thought of shoulders heaving over her, of arms holding her, of a face looking into hers, a honey-white, beardless face, blue eyes, black eyebrows drawn close down on to the blue. Jimmy's face, not Maurice Jourdain's. That was in September. October passed. She began to wonder when he would come again. He came on the last day of November. X. "Maurice, you're keeping something from me. Something's happened. Something's made you unhappy." "Yes. Something's made me unhappy." The Garthdale road. Before them, on the rise, the white highway showed like a sickle curving into the moor. At the horn of the sickle a tall ash tree in the wall of the Aldersons' farm. Where the road dipped they turned. He slouched slowly, his head hung forward, loosening the fold of flesh about his jaw. His eyes blinked in the soft November sunshine. His eyelids were tight as though they had been tied with string. "Supposing I asked you to release me from our engagement?" "For always?"