And it did not lessen his agitation to think of Gerda’s blind, desperate instinct to take refuge with Lobbie, her old childish companion, down there in those Lunt meadows! Just exactly a year ago since the three of them had come home through the spring twilight⁠ ⁠… and now she was to carry her sandwiches to the very spot, eat them with Lob on the trunk of that very tree, set eyes, perhaps, on that very shed, and nothing to persuade her to let him join them.

A pitiful craving came upon him to take her in his arms and purge her bedevilled memory of every trace of that lecherous water-rat. And Christie too⁠—why must Christie, in some crazy psychic mood, go and stir up the villainous fires of that old man’s smouldering lust? The words that he had read in that fatal exercise-book wrote themselves on the Torp wall as he stared at it. If he hadn’t made love to her and then drawn back in the way he did, she’d be still just as she used to be, immune as the flowers on her mantelpiece to that old satyr’s approaches.