he best, don't you?"

"No. Indeed I do not. I like my laughing boy best. You wouldn't catch
Jerry singing a dismal song like that."

"Darling, you used to say Colin was your favourite."

"No, my dear. Never. Never. It was always Jerrold. Ever since he was
born. He never cried when he was a baby. Colin was always crying."

"Poor Col-Col."

"There you are. Nobody'll ever say, 'Poor Jerrold'. I like happy people,
Anne. In this tiresome world it's people's duty to be happy."

"If it was, would they be? Don't look at me as if I wasn't."

"I wasn't thinking of you, ducky... You might tell Pinkney to take _all_
those tea-things off the terrace and put them _back_ into the lounge."

ii

The beech-trees stood in a half ring at the top of the highest field.
Jerrold had come back. He and Anne sat in the bay of the beeches,
looking out over the hills.

Curve after curve of many-coloured hills, rolling together, flung off
from each other, an endless undulation. Rounded heads carrying a clump
of trees like a comb; long steep groins packed with tree-tops; raking
necks hog-maned with stiff plantations. Slopes that spread out fan-wise,
opened wide wings. An immense stretching and flattening of arcs up to
the straight blue wall on the horizon. A band of trees stood up there
like a hedge.

Calm, clean spaces emerging, the bright, sharp-cut pattern of the
fields; squares and fans and pointed triangles, close fitted; emerald
green of the turnips; yellow of the charlock lifted high and clear; red
brown and pink and purple of ploughed land and fallows; red gold of the
wheat and white green of the barley; shimmering in a wash of thin air.

Where Anne and Jerrold sat, green pastures, bitten smooth by the sheep,
flowed down below them in long ridges like waves. On the right the
bright canary coloured charlock brimmed the field. Its flat, vanilla and
almond scent came to them.

"What's Yorkshire like?"

"Not a patch on this place. I can't think what there is about it that
makes you feel so jolly happy."

"But you'd always be happy, Jerrold, anywhere."

"Not like that. I mean a queer, uncanny feeling that you sort of can't
make out."

"I know. I know... There's nothing on earth that gets you like the smell
of charlock."

Anne tilted up her nose and sniffed delicately.

"Fancy seeing this country suddenly for the first time," he said.

"There's such a lot of it. You wouldn't see it properly. It takes ages
just to tell on