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your mood. Through them you knew the land was there, and the feeling that knowledge gave you was not to be put in any words. It was something indefinable, fed by the memories of all your senses; it was something you smelt, grass and earth, bales of wool – something you saw – a hillside moving as a thousand sheep poured over its horizon, white, their backs golden with sunlight, swaying upward to a blue sky. It was the early morning sound of magpies, the hot midday sound of the reaper and binder in the five-hundred-acre-paddock. Not a sharp emotion, not gusty and ephemeral, but something that lived with you, and made a background of contentment to all your days—
    And if, he thought cynically, the love of or for any woman could equal that he’d admit there might be some excuse for all the talk about it! The trouble seemed to be that it had to be both of
and
for. And that, heaven knew, was a fluke! One-sided it became dangerous, explosive, something that muttered beneath the surface of your life like a volcano. Yet it must be,nearly always, like that. The French faced it in their practical way, commented on it with their usual airy cynicism – “il y a toujours un qui baise, et l’autre qui tend la joue!” And which had the worst of it he was damned, now, if he knew! A year ago when Jim was kissing, feverishly, the cool turned cheek of Susan, he’d been afire with indignant sympathy for his brother. But now, he was learning painfully, as no doubt Susan had learned, that it is as difficult to be the loved as the lover.
    More difficult perhaps. For there are many other tributes you can give besides love, but they are all rejected. Many good things which he could feel quite honestly of Susan, pity, admiration, yes, and respect – but to her they were only so many blows in the face—
    And he remembered knocking at the connecting door of their rooms one night, hearing her call, “Come in,” and entering. She’d swung round to the sound of the door with a look of startled fear that checked his words and movements. She’d snatched her wrapper from the back of her chair and clutched it round her. In the mirror opposite he could see the line of her cheek, her bent head. She said with an effort:
    â€œI thought it was Kathleen at the other door. Did – did you want to speak to me?”
    But he was feeling literally sick with pity. A compassion engulfed him which had nothing in it but tenderness. It had been one of those illuminating moments when one feels for the first time something one has always known; the sight of her slender body, its swiftness and litheness and the graceful vigour of its youth being slowly and relentlessly obscured by her coming maternity, had given him an instant’s poignant recognition of ordeal. He’d had a moment of un-cannily clear perception. Pretty awful it must be, in a way, for a woman, this sharing of her own body with another life. Mustn’t they feel sometimes that they wanted to escape? Mustn’t they thirst for a solitude, physical, mental,spiritual, which they couldn’t ever have while the small parasite within them drew its life from theirs—
    He was beside her, his arm round her shoulders. She began to shake violently. He said incoherently:
    â€œYou poor kid! Never mind—”
    She twisted away from him. She flamed at him, cheeks, eyes, hair. Her voice was hoarse, stammering with anger and some indefinable pain:
    â€œGo away! How dare you pity me! Go away—!”
4
    He began to wonder where they were, and to look at the country again. Already the air was colder.

CHAPTER SIX
1
    T HE road just now, to Drew, was bare road and no more. It was twenty-five feet of good metalled surface, greyish, prickled with faintly glittering points of light, bounded on either side by a tearing streak of reddish earth. For the hill, that long, well-graded pull which formed the first step up from plains to mountains,