So they began the journey from Calderbury, with the lamplight flickering and swerving as David pedaled along. The road lay slightly uphill, and it was hard work; but there was no traffic as there would be to-day, no speeding cars, no young men with motorcycles racing between the hedges, no huge omnibuses linking the villages at forty miles an hour; only an old man plodding home, who called “Good night” without knowing, without even trying to see, who passed him. And presently the moon rose and the twin towers of the Cathedral stiffened against the blue-black sky, calling eleven as David topped the hill and prepared to freewheel down. The hill heaped behind, with the dark shape of the Knoll farther still behind, the gradient spinning them into shadows of cold air under trees, and then into the bright glassy moonlight of the level. And after miles of this, keeping a good rate, David began to whistle in pure enjoyment. He often did so as he went about the countryside at night, and if people heard a whistling cyclist they sometimes said: “Bet you that’s the little doctor.” So now he went on whistling till the beginning of Croombury Hill made him save his breath, and a few yards higher forced him off his machine altogether. He dismounted with the usual acrobatic flourish for which Leni was hardly prepared and which would have capsized her into the ditch had she not been agile.

“This is a steep one,” he said, affectionately, to the earth and sky, and then paused in the middle of the road, feeling in his pocket for pipe and tobacco and matches. “But we’re doing fine — we’ll easily catch the ten to twelve. Are you tired?”

“No, but it hurts my knee a little.”

“It’s not far now — just through Lissington village and over the next hill. I know all the country round here. Every village and lane and path. I know the people in the cottages, and in the churchyards too. This is a good country, England. I’ve been round about here for fifteen years. You must have been a baby when I first put up my plate. Hundreds of miles away in some German village I’ve never heard of, and you grew up — all unknown to me, all those years — to fall over one night and break your wrist in Calderbury. If you hadn’t come here and done that I’d never have known you at all. That’s a funny thing. And it’s funnier still to think that I shouldn’t have missed knowing you … Some German village, wasn’t it? Tell me about it.”

“It was a city, really — Königsberg. My parents both died when I was young and I was sent to a school — the school I ran away from.”

“We’re at the top of the hill now. Better jump on again. We can go on talking.”

He kept his cherry-wood pipe in his mouth and the smoke and sometimes the flakes of hot tobacco flew back in her face as they gathered speed. “Plenty of time,” he muttered, wobbling dangerously as he pointed to the horizon. “There are the Junction lights — see them? That reddish glow yonder!”