“Not here,” said Jinny, coyly shrinking. “There’s nettles.”
“They’re dead!” he said, grasping their yellow brittleness. But they walked on.
They came over baby bracken and crisp beechnuts to a sort of ring surrounded by blushing young oaks, and little silver birches with their flat green leaves, and tall aspen-trees, and one lonely mountain-ash with white flowers. Overhead, early as it was, the moon had long been hanging at three-quarters, white and magically diaphanous: a dream-planet. Unseen wood-pigeons purred, and a tomtit was singing.
“Here!” said Will, beginning to sit down.
“No, no!” She clutched his arm to keep him up. “An ant-heap!” This time her shyness had found sounder cover.
He gave a comical “Oh!” and stood watching the squirm of seething life, absolutely black at the central congestion, where ants walked indifferently under or over one another: they were like the moving grains in an hour-glass, Jinny thought. Will poked his stick into the great piazza.
“Don’t,” said Jinny.
“I’m not hurting them.” The ants were, in fact, already using the rod as a causeway. “Why, they’re like you, Jinny!”
“Like me?”
“All carriers and all busy.”