A strange, wicked yellow light shone at him in her eyes.

He hesitated, baffled, withdrawing.

‘No,’ he said, ‘it isn’t. Spoken like that, never in the world. You’ve no business to utter the word.’

‘I must leave it to you, to take it out of the Ark of the Covenant at the right moment,’ she mocked.

Again they looked at each other. She suddenly sprang up, turned her back to him, and walked away. He too rose slowly and went to the water’s edge, where, crouching, he began to amuse himself unconsciously. Picking a daisy he dropped it on the pond, so that the stem was a keel, the flower floated like a little water lily, staring with its open face up to the sky.