‘Only tell me what I can do,’ she pleaded, but apparently there was nothing. Angela came several times to Morton and dutifully attended the fencing lessons. But they did not go well, for Stephen would glimpse her staring abstractedly out of the window; then the sly, agile foil with its blunt tipped nose, would slip in under Stephen’s guard and shame her. They would sometimes go far afield in the car, and one night they stopped at an inn and had dinner—Angela ringing up her husband with the old and now threadbare excuse of a breakdown. They dined in a quiet little room by themselves; the scents of the garden came in through the window—warm, significant scents, for now it was May and many flowers multiplied in that garden. Never before had they done such a thing as this, they had never dined all alone at a wayside inn miles away from their homes, just they two, and Stephen stretched out her hand and covered Angela’s where it rested very white and still on the table. And Stephen’s eyes held an urgent question, for now it was May and the blood of youth leaps and strains with the sap in early summer. The air seemed breathless, since neither would speak, afraid of disturbing the thick, sweet silence—but Angela shook her head very slowly. Then they could not eat, for each was filled with the same and yet with a separate longing; so after a while they must get up and go, both conscious of a sense of painful frustration. They drove back on a road that was paved with moonlight, and presently Angela fell fast asleep like an unhappy child—she had taken her hat off and her head lay limply against Stephen’s shoulder. Seeing her thus, so helpless in sleep, Stephen felt strangely moved, and she drove very slowly, fearful of waking the woman who slept like a child with her fair head against her shoulder. The car climbed the steep hill from Ledbury town, and presently there lay the wide Wye valley whose beauty had saddened a queer little girl long before she had learnt the pain of all beauty. And now the valley was bathed in whiteness, while here and there gleamed a roof or a window, but whitely, as though all the good valley folk had extinguished their lamps and retired to their couches. Far away, like dark clouds coming up out of Wales, rose range upon range of the old Black Mountains, with the tip of Gadrfawr peering over the others, and the ridge of Pen-cerrigcalch sharp against the skyline. A little wind ruffled the bracken on the hillsides, and Angela’s hair blew across her closed eyes so that she stirred and sighed in her sleep. Stephen bent down and began to soothe her.