They passed their time in bathing and boating and walking, and sometimes Mary was with them, but mostly she was not. They went out in the mornings, soon after breakfast, taking food with them, and seldom returned until the evening. They took long tramps to Honiton and Lyme Regis and Sidmouth, and once they walked to Exeter and returned home by train. Mary liked boating and bathing, but she did not care for walking, and the distances they travelled were beyond her strength; and so it came about that gradually, during Henry's stay at Boveyhayne, she ceased to take part in their outings. It seemed odd to him that she did not make any reference to their love-making. She called him "Quinny" and was friendly enough, but she called Gilbert by his Christian name and was as friendly with him as she was with Henry. He felt hurt when he thought of her indifference to him. "You'd think she'd forgotten about it!" he said to himself one evening when he was sitting alone with her in the garden, and he oscillated between the desire to ignore her and the desire to have it out with her; but he dallied so long between one desire and the other that Gilbert and Ninian and Mrs. Graham had joined them before he had made a decision. He could not understand Mary. She seemed to have grown shy and quiet and much less demonstrative than she had been when he first knew her.

"Mary's growing up," Mrs. Graham said to him one evening, irrelevantly; and of course she was, but she had not grown up so much that there should be all this difference between Mary now and Mary then.

"Oh, well!" he generally concluded when his thoughts turned to her, "she's only a kid!"

And sometimes that explanation seemed to satisfy him. There were other times when it failed to satisfy him, and he told himself that Mary was justly cold to him because he had not been loyal to their compact. He had not answered her letters and he had made love to Sheila Morgan. "I suppose," he said to himself, "I'd be at Ballymartin now, making love to Sheila, if it hadn't been for that horse!"

He tried on several occasions to talk to Mary about her unanswered letter, to invent some explanation of his neglect, but always he failed to say anything, too nervous to begin, too afraid of being snubbed, too eager to leave the explanation over until the next day; and so he never "had it out" with her.

"I am a fool!" he would say to himself in angry rebuke, but even while he was reproaching himself, his mind was devising an excuse for his behaviour. "We're really too young," he would add. "It's silly of me to think of this sort of thing at all, and Mary's still a schoolgirl!..."

"I'll just say something to her before I go away," he thought. "Something that will ... explain everything!"

Then Mr. Quinn wrote to him to say that he was in London on business. He was anxious that Henry should come to town so that they could return to Ireland together. "We'll go to Dublin," he wrote, "and I'll leave you there. You needn't come to Ballymartin until the end of the first term."

He felt strangely chilled by his father's letter. This jolly holiday at Boveyhayne was to be the end of one life, and the journey to Dublin was to be the beginning of another; and he did not wish to end the one life or begin the other. He could feel growing within him, an extraordinary hatred of Trinity College, and he almost wrote to his father to say that he would rather not go to a University at all than go to T. C. D. It was cruel, he told himself, to separate him from his friends and compel him to go to a college that meant nothing on earth to him.

"I shan't know any one there," he said to Gilbert and Ninian, "and I probably won't want to know any one. It's a hole, that's what it is, a rotten hole. If the dons were any good, they'd be at Oxford or Cambridge!..."

"You're not much of a patriot," Ninian said.

"I don't want to be a damned patriot. I want to be with people I like. I don't see why I should be compelled to go and live with a lot of people I don't know and don't care about, just because I'm Irish and they're Irish, when I really want to be with you and Gilbert and Roger.... I haven't seen Roger since I left Rumpell's and I don't suppose I shall see him for a long time!"

Gilbert tried to mock him out of his anger. "This emotion does you credit, young Quinny!" he said, "and we are touched, Ninian and I. Aren't we, Ninian! But you must be a man, Quinny! Four years hence, we shall all meet in London, Deo volente, and we'll be able to compare the education of Ireland with the education of England. Oh, Lordy God, I sometimes wish we hadn't got minds at all. I think it must be lovely to be a cow ... nothing to do but chew the damned cud all day. No soul to consider, no mind to improve, no anything!..."

Gilbert and he left Boveyhayne together, but Gilbert was only going as far as Templecombe with him, where he was to change on his way to Cheltenham. Ninian and Mary saw them off at Whitcombe, and when he remembered the circumstances in which she had seen him off before, Henry had a longing to take hold of her arm and lead her to the end of the platform, as he had done then, and tell her that he was sorry for everything and beg her to start again where they had left off that day ... but Gilbert was there and Ninian was there, and there was no opportunity, and the train went off, leaving the explanation unmade.