No. They’d never find it till morning. And so indirect were the flying routes that they would not be able to catch him even by plane.

He gave up sleep. When he lighted a cigarette, in the glow of the match he saw Hazel’s face tense. ‘Lemme drive again,’ he grunted, with no shadings from the tenderness he felt.

The route nicked off only a corner of Worcester, and instantly they were again in the graveyard lane. But at Waltham there was a shivering hint of daylight, and he suddenly felt strong and gay. Almost in Boston! Almost on a ship! Almost bucking the winter ocean! So he cheerfully slowed up for the first traffic, after their dash across one wide state and half another, and decorously he slipped up to a hotel on Beacon Street, in winter daylight.

The doorman yawned, ‘Like your car garaged for all day?’

Fred slightly alarmed him by sighing, ‘I want to pay in advance for storing it, dead, for three months,’ and by sentimentally smoothing the hot cheeks of its bonnet.

Would he ever drive a Triumph again?

He slept for two hours; Hazel, so far as he knew, till noon. He hastened to the tourist agency to which he had telephoned from Sachem and bought two tickets from Boston to Constantinople (Constantinople!), on the Aranjuna Queen, a cargo ship which carried some twenty passengers and which was headed for Channel ports, Lisbon, Gibraltar and clear round the Mediterranean. (But he did not call it a ‘cargo ship’ as yet; not till he had been baptized with salt water and the chief officer’s salty jeers would he know how land-lubberly he had once been in calling the Aranjuna a ‘freight boat’.)

He galloped about Boston, being polylingual to the extent of always saying ‘Jah’ for ‘Yes,’ and timidly demanded visas for Great Britain, Portugal, Jugoslavia and other patently fictional lands. He bought a book called A Satchel Guide to Europe, and a small motion-picture camera with which he hoped to snap Hazel walking in front of the pyramids, Hazel feeding pigeons at St. Mark’s, Hazel fishing in a Norwegian fjord.

And he bought for her six winter roses — very expensive.

At two o’clock that afternoon they stood amidships on the S.S. Aranjuna Queen, looking down on the freight-littered pier. From the bridge, they heard the captain shouting to the chief officer, up on the forecastle head, ‘Single up, fore and aft,’ and the bosun bellowing to the sailors, ‘Heave the gangway aboard.’

Hazel clutched his arm. ‘Our last link with shore! In a minute, it’ll be too late!’

‘Yes, too late,’ he croaked.

The gangway was slid up and flopped on the deck.

The last lines were let go. The captain, above them, cried to the third mate, at the engine-room telegraph, ‘Slow astern.’ They were incredibly moving; going, for the first time in either of their lives, from the security of land to the savage unknown. They held each other like terrified children as the whistle burst into obscene blatting.