He might be fond of Annabel, but he wanted his last half-hour in Belfayol alone with Hazel. He lured her to their best café; not the historic castle cave but the tiny new bar where the wall bench was so bright and red, the iron tables such shining green, the awning over the sidewalk so sunshine-like a yellow. Embedded in the glass of the windows was wire in the shape of stalks and flowers.

‘Lord, I hate to skip off and leave you, girl. Will we ever sit in a foreign saloon again?’

‘Oh, we will, and be so close to each other. I regret every second I’ve spent away from you; like running off to Bandol with those silly women this morning.’

‘No. Less friction, when we don’t tag each other. And now you just forget me for a while.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Well . . . By golly, we pulled it off. Didn’t we!’

‘Yes . . . We did see Europe. Didn’t we!’

‘Yes . . . And I didn’t do so bad. Did I! I wasn’t too bad a greenhorn. Was I!’ Fred seemed not too sure about it.’

‘Never . . . And I was a good sport. The old folks showed they could run off together. And I did learn to like Burgundy. Didn’t I!’

‘Yes, you bet . . . Golly!’

‘Happy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, be happy!’

So absorbed was he in Hazel, their last half-hour, that when the young American couple whom he had always wanted to pick up went swinging by, he nodded to them casually and wasn’t even flattered by their pleased bow in answer.

On the R.M.S. Sovereign’s five-day falcon flight to New York, Fred spoke to no one but stewards and the inescapable stranger who interrupted his vigil, again at the forward rail of the promenade deck, by inquiring, ‘Well, how do you like this weather?’

He was a veteran of travel now; he could have produced seasoned remarks to the effect that he ‘liked it a little rough like this; then you know you’re at sea.’ But he barely saw the friendly greeter, for wavering between them were Howard, Sara, Hazel, Annabel, Cal Tillery.

He grunted, ‘All right, I guess,’ and let it go at that. Beyond the bobbing spectral faces he saw, on the midsea horizon, a quivering dark bank that must be the Long Island shore, that must be America.

Standing at the rail, he tried to work out a philosophy of The Family. He saw it in sharp-coloured little motion pictures rather than in definite words, but they might have been translated thus:

Women have for decades been revolting against the restrictions of men and the home. Votes. Jobs. Uniforms in 1914–18. Cocktails they didn’t appreciate enough and cigarettes they appreciated too much. Now the children were revolting; thought their parents were convenient bores at best, tyrants at worst; children not, as for centuries past, claiming merely their own just rights in the household, but domination over it.