Fred chuckled, ‘He used to draw curlicues, and he said they were smoke from a chimney, but I’d turn the house into a pig!’

She held up the gilt-lettered invitation to Sara’s first public dance, the High School Assembly, when she had been fifteen. He remembered Sara in the preposterously short skirt of the day, her legs so long and reedy: remembered that her hair had been short and choppy and uncombable as a boy’s. Such a gallant little tike she had been.

Hazel was sobbing, ‘Oh, Fred, must we . . . They’re so sweet. And they’re all we have.’

Just then the one thing in the world he wanted to do was not to do the intemperate thing that was the one thing in the world he wanted to do. As desperately as a man who has got himself into a fight that is too big for him, he wished that he had never started the commotion. He struggled:

‘I know. But we’ll mean all the more to them if they see us as something besides a couple of stand-bys that they can take for granted.’

He helped her finish packing. She had brilliantly foreseen that they mustn’t take anything they didn’t indisputably need; they kept the luggage down to eight bags, and perhaps a canvas roll and a few odd bundles; and in all of them, later, they found nothing unnecessary except, possibly: A large framed photograph of Sara aged eleven and Howard aged four; photographs of the same ones, two, five and nine years later; a handsome binocular case which proved to contain not the binoculars but shells for a sixteen-gauge shotgun; a map of New England; volume two of Tom Jones — neither of them had read volume one; a guidebook of Austro–Hungary dated 1913; half pair gent’s alligator-hide slippers; a bar of almond chocolate; an extra hairbrush, which each of them had thought belonged to the other; four sheets of letter paper headed ‘Olympia Hotel, East Utica’; a pair of round golf garters; nail tint, which Hazel never used; an empty box for digestive pills; and a magnificent, transparent, purple waterproof, which proved to be split down the back.

Their bags were all in the Triumph coupé; they sat outside, in a forbidding world of frost, looking up at their home. It seemed kind and secure, built not of bricks but of hopes. The street before them was a corridor of forbidding steel.

She gasped, resolutely turning her face from the house, ‘Oh, go, go quick — while we can.’

It was miles afterward that she asked, ‘Do you happen to know what ship we’re going on, what port we’re going to? I don’t suppose it matters, really, now that we’ve given up everything we’ve loved and trusted, but it might be interesting!’

He stopped the car. ‘Sure. It’s hard. We can go back, of course. It all comes down to — and I’m not so doggone certain I’ve got a right to ask it — but it’s a question of do you trust me?’