Margaret, yielding to pressure and inclination, stayed on and on until the week passed and the next one was broken in upon. Now it was Tuesday and there was only one more week. One more week! Sometimes it seemed incredible. Always it seemed as if the sun was shining and the light growing more intense, blinding. She moved toward it unsteadily. This semi-American atmosphere into which she and her lover had become absorbed was an atmosphere of hustle, kaleidoscopic, shifting. “If they had only given me time to think I should have known that the clothes and the house-linen, the carpets and curtains, the piano and the choice of a car, could all wait until we came back, could wait even after that. But they tear along and carry us after them in a whirlwind of tempestuous good-nature,” Margaret said ruefully in the five minutes they secured together before dinner that Tuesday evening. “You are doing too much, exhausting your energy, using up your strength. And we have not found time for even one prowl after old furniture in our own way, that we spoke of at Carbies.” “They are spoiling the house with the talk of preserving it. Today Father told me it was absolutely necessary the floors should be levelled....” “I know. And he wants the kitchen concreted. Some wretched person with the lips of a day-labourer and the soul of an iconoclast told him the place was swarming with rats....” “We wanted to hear mysterious noises behind the wainscot.” They were half-laughing, but there was an undercurrent of seriousness in their complaining. They and their house were caught in the torpedo-netting of the parental Rysams’ strong common sense. Confronted and caught they had to admit there was little glamour in rats and none at all in black beetles. Still ... concrete! To yield to it was weakness, to deny it, folly. “I have lost sight of logic and forgotten how to argue. There is nothing for it but to run away again. Gabriel, I have quite made up my mind. Tomorrow, I am going back to Carbies. There are things to settle up there, arrange. Stevens is coming back with me, and we are going before anybody is up. Every day I have said that I must go, and each time Father and Mother have answered breathlessly that it was impossible, interposed the most cogent arguments. Now I am going without telling them.” “I am sure there is nothing else to be done. And stay until next week. Let me come down Saturday. We need quiet. I feel as if I had been in a machine room the last few days.” “‘All day the wheels keep turning,’” she quoted. “Yes, that expresses it perfectly. Run away and let me run after you. Saturday afternoon and Sunday we will be on the beach, listen to the sea, and forget the use of speech.” “The use and abuse of speech. I’ll wear my oldest clothes. No! I won’t. You shall have a treat. I really have some most exquisite things. I’ll take them all down; change every hour or two, give you a private view....”