Walter looked pleased—but he was talking to me, and I knew it and was glad.
I don’t know even now how much the difference was in him and how much in me. He seemed to me very different this time, from that afternoon at Oxford three years before. He seemed to me now to have more life and more assurance, as though he felt himself here on his own ground. But perhaps I was more ready to notice him now. There had been no room for him at all in my mind before.
When we had finished looking at the camp Guy said we must go on. We were to sleep at Gilsland that night if we could, and the evenings were short.
Walter had come that way the day before, and slept at a farm near by, but he said now that he would walk back with us. He did not say ‘if you don’t mind’ or ‘may I?’ as one somehow expected him to say. He just said:
‘I will go with you. I know this wall pretty well.’
We walked along the top of the wall for a long way, up hills and down, always at the edge of the cliff, with the barbarian country below. Then the others said they would take the lower track, farther down across the fell, but I wouldn’t. I kept along the top of the wall, and Walter came with me.
Once Hugo called me.
‘It is much easier along here,’ he said. ‘You had much better come down.’
And I said:
‘I won’t come down. I am going into the barbarian country.’