It would have been dangerous for Jerrold to have left the house at night to go to the Manor Farm. At any moment he might have been betrayed by his own footsteps treading the passages and stairs, by the slipping of locks and bolts, the sound of the opening and shutting of doors. The servants might be awake and hear him; they might go to his room and find that he was not there.
But Colin's shelter stood in a recess on the lawn, open to the fields and hidden from the house by tall hedges of yew. Nobody could see him slip out into the moonlight or the darkness; nobody could hear the soft padding of his feet on the grass. He had only to run down the three fields and cross the belt of firs to come to Anne's shelter at the bottom. The blank, projecting wall of the mill hid it from the cottages and the Manor Farm house; the firs hid it from the field path; a high bank, topped by a stone wall, hid it from the road and Sutton's Farm. Its three wooden walls held them safe.
Night after night, between eleven and midnight, he came to her. Night after night, she lay awake waiting till the light rustling of the meadow grass told her he was there: on moonlit nights a quick brushing sound; in the thick blackness a sound like a slow shearing as he felt his way. The moon would show him clear, as he stood in the open frame of the shelter, looking in at her; or she would see him grey, twilit and mysterious; or looming, darker than dark, on black nights without moon or stars.
They loved the clear nights when their bodies showed to each other white under the white moon; they loved the dark nights that brought them close, shutting them in, annihilating every sensation but that of his tense, hard muscles pressing down, of her body crushed and yielding, tightening and slackening in surrender; of their brains swimming in their dark ecstasy.
They loved the warmth of each other's bodies in the hot windless nights; they loved their smooth, clean coolness washed by the night wind. Nothing, not even the sweet, haunting ghost of Maisie, came between. They would fall asleep in each other's arms and lie there till dawn, till Anne woke in a sudden fright. Always she had this fear that some day they would sleep on into the morning, when the farm people would be up and about. Jerrold lay still, tired out with satisfaction, sunk under all the floors of sleep. She had to drag him up, with kisses first and light stroking, then with a strong undoing of their embrace, pushing back his heavy arms that fell again to her breast as she parted them. Then she would wrench herself loose and shake him by the shoulders till she woke him. He woke clean, with no ugly turning and yawning, but with a great stretching of his strong body and a short, sudden laugh, the laugh he had for danger. Then he would look at his wrist watch and show it her, laughing again as she saw that this time, again, they were safe. And they would lie a little while longer, looking into each other's faces for the sheer joy of looking, reckless with impunity. And he would start up suddenly with, "I say, Anne, I must clear out or we shall be caught." And they would get up.
Outside, the world looked young and unknown in the June dawn, in the still, clear, gold-crystal air, where green leaves and green grass shone with a strange, hard lustre like fresh paint, and yet unearthly, uncreated, fixed in their own space and time.
And she would go with him, her naked feet shining white on the queer, bright, cold green of the grass, up the field to the belt of firs that stood up, strange and eternal, under the risen sun.
They parted there, holding each other for a last kiss, a last clinging, as if never in this world they would meet again.
Dawn after dawn. They belonged to the dawn and the dawn light; the dawn was their day; they knew it as they knew no other time.
And Anne would go back to her shelter, and lie there, and live through their passion again in memory, till she fell asleep.