he had said that first evening, when he supped at Navron, about bearing the same blemish. Suddenly she saw that he was pulling in his line, and she leaned forward in the boat, her shoulder touching his shoulder, and she called excitedly, 'Have you caught something?'
'Yes,' he said, 'do you want to pull it in?'
'It would not be fair,' she said longingly, 'he is your fish.' Laughing, he gave her the line, and she brought the struggling fish to the side of the boat, and landed it on the bottom boards, where it jumped and flapped, coiling itself in the twisted line. She knelt down and seized it between her hands, her dress all wet and muddied from the river, her ringlets falling over her face.
'He is not so big as the one I lost,' she said.
'They never are,' he answered.
'But I caught him, I brought him in all right, did I not?'
'Yes, you did very well.'
She was still kneeling, trying to take the hook out of the mouth of the fish. 'Oh, poor little thing, he is dying,' she said. 'I am hurting him, what shall I do?' She turned to him in great distress, and he came and knelt beside her, taking the fish from her hands and releasing the hook with a sudden jerk. Then he put his fingers in the mouth and bent back the head, so that the fish struggled an instant, and lay dead.
'You have killed him,' she said sadly.
'Yes,' he said, 'was not that what you wanted me to do?'
She did not answer, aware for the first time, now the excitement was over, how close he was to her, their shoulders touching, his hands beside her hand, and that he was smiling again in his silent secret way, and she was filled suddenly with a glow hitherto unknown to her, a brazen, shameless longing to be closer still, with his lips touching hers and his hands beneath her back. She looked away from him, out across the river, dumb and stricken with a new flame that had arisen within her, fearful that he might read the message in her eyes and so despise her, like Harry and Rocking- ham despised the women at the Swan, and she began to pat her ringlets into place again, and smooth her dress, silly little mechanical gestures she felt could not deceive him, but gave her some measure of protection from her own naked self.
When she was calm again, she threw a glance at him over her shoulder, and saw that he had wound in the lines, and was taking the paddles in his hands.
'Hungry?' he said.
'Yes,' she answered, her voice a little uncertain, not quite her own.
'Then we will build our fire and cook our supper,' he said. The sun had gone now, and the shadows were beginning to creep over the water. The tide was running fast, and he pushed the boat out into the channel so that the current helped to carry them down stream. She curled herself up in the bows and sat with her legs crossed beneath her, her chin cupped in her hands.
The golden lights had gone, and the sky was paler now, mysterious and soft, while the water itself seemed darker than before. There was a smell of moss about the air, and the young green from the woods, and the bitter tang of bluebells. Once, in mid-stream, he paused, and listened, and turning her head towards the shore she heard, for the first time, a curious churring sound, low and rather harsh, fascinating in its quiet monotony.
'Night-jar,' he said, looking at her an instant, and then away again, and she knew, at that moment, that he had read the message in her eyes a little while before, and he did not despise her for it, he knew and understood, because he felt as she did, the same flame, the same longing. But because she was a woman and he a man these things would never be admitted to one another; they were both bound by a strange reserve until their moment came, which might be to-morrow, or the day after, or never-the matter was not of their own choosing.
He pushed on down stream without a word, and presently they came to the entrance of the creek, where the trees crowded to the water's edge, and edging up close in-shore into the narrow channel they came to a little clearing in the woods where there had once been a quay, and he rested on his paddles and said: 'This?'
'Yes,' she answered, and he pushed the nose of the boat into the soft mud, and they climbed ashore.
He pulled the boat out of the tide, and then reached for his knife, and kneeling beside the water cleaned the fish, calling over his shoulder for Dona to build the fire.
She found some dry twigs, under the trees, and broke them across her knee, her dress torn now and hopelessly crumpled, and she thought, laughing to herself, of Lord Godolphin and his lady, and their stare of bewilderment could they see her now, no better than a travelling gypsy woman, with all a gypsy's primitive feelings too, and a traitor to her country into the bargain.
She built the sticks, one against the other. He came up from the water's edge, having cleaned the fish, and knelt beside the fire, with his flint and tinder, and slowly kindled the flame, which came in a little flash at first, and then burnt brighter. Presently the long sticks crackled and flared, and they looked across the flames and laughed at one another.
'Have you ever cooked fish, in the open?' he asked. She shook her head, and he cleared a little place in the ashes beneath the sticks, and laid a flat stone in the centre, and placed the fish upon it. He cleaned his knife on his breeches, and then, crouching beside the fire, he waited a few minutes until the fish began to brown, when he turned it with his knife, so that the heat came to it more easily. It was darker here in the creek than it had been in the open river, and the trees threw long shadows down to the quay. There was a radiance in the deepening sky belonging only to those nights of midsummer, brief and lovely, that whisper for a moment in time and go forever. Dona watched his hands, busy with the fish, and glanced up at his face, intent upon his cooking, the brows frowning a little in concentration, and his skin reddened by the glow of the fire. The good food smell came to her nostrils and to his at the same moment, and he looked at her and smiled, saying not a word, but turned the fish once again to the crackling flame.
Then, when he had judged it brown enough, he lifted it with his knife onto a leaf, the fish all sizzling and bubbling with the heat, and slicing it down the middle he pushed one half of the fish onto the edge of the leaf, giving her the knife, and taking the other half between his fingers began to eat, laughing at her as he did so. 'It is a pity,' said Dona, spearing her fish with the knife, 'that we have nothing to drink.' In answer he rose to his feet and went down to the boat at the water's edge, coming back in a moment with a long slim bottle in his hands.
'I had forgotten,' he said, 'that you were used to supping at the Swan.'
She did not reply at once, stung momentarily by his words, and then, as he poured the wine into the glass he had brought for her, she asked, 'What do you know of my suppers at the Swan?' He licked his fingers, sticky with the fish, and poured some wine into a second glass for himself.
'The Lady St. Columb sups cheek by jowl with the ladies of the town,' he said, 'and later roysters about the streets and highways like a boy with his breeches down, returning home as the night-watchman seeks his bed.'
She held her glass between her hands, not drinking, staring down at the dark water, and into her mind suddenly came the thought that he believed her bawdy, promiscuous, like the women in the tavern, and considered that her behaviour now, sitting beside him in the open air at night, cross-legged, like a gypsy, was but another brief interlude in a series of escapades, that she had, in a similar fashion, behaved thus with countless others, with Rockingham, with all Harry's friends and acquaintances, that she was nothing but a spoilt whore, lusting after new sensations, without even a whore's excuse of poverty. She wondered why the thought that he might believe this of her should cause her such intolerable pain, and it seemed to her that the light had gone out of the evening, and all the lovely pleasure was no more. She wished suddenly she was at Navron, at home, in her own room, with James coming in to her, staggering on fat unsteady legs, so that she could pick him up in her arms, and hold him tight, and bury her face in his smooth fat cheek and forget this new strange anguish that filled her heart, this feeling of sorrow, of lost bewilderment.
'Are you not thirsty after all?' he said, and she turned to him, her eyes tormented. 'No,' she said. 'No, I believe not,' and fell silent again, playing with the ends of her sash.
It seemed to her that the peace of their being together was broken, and a constraint had come between them. His words had hurt her, and he knew that they had hurt her, and as they stared into the fire without a word all the unspoken hidden things flamed in the air, creating a brittle atmosphere of unrest.
At last he broke the silence, his voice very low and quiet.
'In the winter,' he said, 'when I used to lie in your room at Navron, and look at your picture, I made my own pictures of you in my mind. I would see you fishing perhaps, as we did this afternoon, or watching the sea from the decks of La Mouette. And somehow, the pictures would not fit with the servants' gossip I had heard from time to
