Wolf lifted his thick eyebrows and let them fall again, wrinkling them so that a great puckered fold established itself above his hooked nose. His ruddy face, under its rough crop of coarse, bleached hair, resembled a red sandstone cliff on the top of which a whitish-yellow patch of withered grass bowed before the wind.

The girl clambered to her feet, and, smoothing out her skirt beneath her, sat down on the ground by his side, hugging her knees.

“I found out I could whistle like that,” she began again, this time in a slow, meditative voice, “when I used to play with Bob in the Lunt ditches, down Longmead. I fooled him endless times doing different birds. Listen to this. Do you know what this is?” And with her mouth pursed up into the form of a crimson sea-anemone, she imitated the cry of the female plover when any strange foot, of man or beast, approaches her nest on the ground.