Something behind his friend’s mackerel-coloured eyes seemed at that moment of time to be reaching out to his inmost soul and crying to it for some answering signal. The fact that Mattie only yesterday had called upon her mother, so long dead, and that Darnley was now reverting to a father he had never even mentioned before, struck Wolf’s mind as an ominous glimpse into the central nerve of life upon earth. He felt at that moment an out-rushing wave of intense affection for Darnley. But what could he do? Olwen refused to let him so much as even smile at the yellow beard across the table. She turned his head towards her with one of her sticky little hands.

“What did the wind say then?” she cried. “What did it say to me when I told it to blow me to Weymouth?”

“It said, ‘You want too much!’ ” he went on. “It said, ‘I’m afraid you’re not a real bird at all! If you were a real bird you wouldn’t care what you did or where you went, as long as you were flying. You’d hover over Dorset, looking at everything⁠—looking at every cuckooflower in the Lunt fields, and every nest in the Gwent Lanes. You’d hover⁠—’ ”