“Are you all right?” Edward asked.

“Sure, I’m fine,” Earle smiled heroically.

Edward put his mouth to Georges’ ear and suddenly bellowed:

“Sept heures moins un quart!”

Georges woke up without a start and gave him a dazzling smile. Maurice began sounding long blasts on his horn.

“Gates!” he yelled: “Gates!”

Edward pushed them open and Maurice drove through into the park, Tommy following. As they moved off down the drive, Pamela woke up and turned round. The sight of Mary seemed to surprise her. She sat up sharply, in a way which instantly conveyed that not more than a year ago she’d been a schoolgirl, with her innocent head full of abductions and the White Slave Traffic. Then she was properly awake and recognised them all with a grin of relief.

“I must have been asleep,” she confessed, with surprise.

Mary was thinking how narrow the drive was and how much smaller the whole park seemed. In less than a minute they were running downhill to the house. Anne, beside Tommy, fixed her eyes on the red spark of Maurice’s tail-light. The hood of the two-seater was draughty. She had got a stiff neck. Tommy’s profile, as he leant forward to the gear-lever, showed sharp against the pale stretch of land. It was getting lighter every minute. She rested her cheek for a moment against his shoulder.

“What is it?” asked Tommy, his eyes fixed ahead.

Then he realised and slipped one arm round her shoulder as he drove. He would, perhaps, always be a little slow, a few seconds late. My darling. My precious treasure. Feeling the rough tweed against her cheek, Anne spoke in a small dreamy voice:

“She’s been running splendidly, hasn’t she?”

“Not too badly. It’s this new juice. We must stick to it.”

Their voices were so warm and intimate with love that they might have been talking of a newborn baby. Gerald’s old two-seater, which he’d turned over to Tommy when he got the Bentley. And within a week came the smash. The doctor said that if he’d lived he’d have been a cripple. It was impossible to think of Gerald as a cripple. It made Anne shudder. She’d sometimes felt a sort of hatred of his red beefy health. He was strong and stupid like an animal. And like an animal he had been suddenly and stupidly killed, with a pipe in his mouth, travelling at seventy miles an hour. She’d never forget how Tommy had come to her, that afternoon, straight from the hospital. He had seemed quite dazed. He had to keep telling her exactly what had happened.

“You know, Anne,” he kept repeating, “at first I didn’t recognise him at all. It might have been a stranger.”

And through all her horror—strange, remorseless, as it seemed—she’d felt a curious, new joy, growing up swiftly and secretly in the darkness of her heart. Gerald had done this for her. At last. Within a week of the funeral she’d told Tommy that she loved him.