"They must take their chance. I wish I knew the hour."
"You said it must be two o'clock."
"The sun does not rise till half-past five. Three hours and a half. I wonder why we left the chariot. It would be wiser to go back. You will be cold in this open country."
The wind was blowing shrewdly up there in the starlight, and Phyllida would not deny she was cold and tired.
"We had better go back to the chaise. ’Twas warmer in the valley."
Yet both of them felt a strange disinclination to risk the disillusion of return till, suddenly, up there in the wind and starlight, terror caught them, and the noise of water tumbling over rocks gave them a sense of security from this wide place of silence.
"'Tis a monstrous uneasy country," said Vernon, voicing in common speech the sense of woe that oppressed him.
"I feel frightened," Phyllida agreed, "let us go back to the water."
They stopped to listen as people will whose minds have been much wrought upon. There was nothing but the lisp of the wind in the bents of last year's grass and a melodious sighing in the boughs of larches. Yet never throughout that adventurous night had Phyllida's heart pattered at such a pace, never had she been so near to shrieking aloud. Without longer delay they turned back in the direction of the coombe, walking with quick steps as if to avoid an invisible pursuit. Half-way down the hill, Vernon stooped to gather a primrose.
"Here's a daisy," he said.