Penelope Ludham was twenty-two. For several years she had been going three days a week to London, where, in the manuscript room of the British Museum, she copied illuminated capitals from missals and psalters for a firm of church furnishers who specialized in high-class Christmas 65stationery. People receiving Penelope’s hand-painted cards would remark that they were really quite good enough to frame, and then put them away with a feeling of doing something more later. But to-day she was going to elope with Robin Jones, who worked in the same firm’s stained-glass department, and whose wife was too religious ever to divorce him. Penelope was also religious, too religious to go to bed with a man unless she could do it openly and habitually, which would, at any rate in the case of a couple who had fallen in love so deeply as she and Robin, constitute a marriage in the sight of heaven. She was so sure about this that earlier in the morning she had gone fasting to the early service at St Jude’s in order to set out in a state of grace. The suitcase was an outward and visible sign of the inward grace, and she had carried it downstairs without a qualm, hearing the sewing-machine and knowing that her mother was only interested in departures that were made in best clothes. But now she began her walk to the station stiffly trembling at the thought of the danger that had lain in wait. If her mother had gone to fetch the blue taffeta dress she could not have failed to notice the suitcase just inside the door. Though this danger had been averted, it still vibrated in Penelope’s mind, and seemed to be like an explosion, itself smothered, which could yet fire a train of other dangers. Milk was being delivered at Avondale, and the pony who drew the milk-cart was standing as usual with his forefeet on the pavement, canvassing to have his nose patted. Suppose as she went by he turned suddenly and bit her arm? The elm tree in front of the Memorial 66Hall, brooding in its late summer foliage, might drop a limb on her. The Owen girls might come out of Lindenlea, announce that they were off to town and insist on accompanying her. Even the paving-stones lay in wait to do her an injury. They seemed to rise up and thump her feet, so that she was in peril of making a false step and spraining an ankle. All this was but a mild suburban prelude to what London might have up its sleeve. ‘I will concentrate on getting to the station,’ she thought. ‘When that is done, I shall have finished the first stage.’ Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte. The words bobbed into her mind, and immediately she conceived the ridiculous hallucination that she was carrying her decapitated head under one arm, like Saint Denis. ‘Why are you looking at me so funnily?’ her mother had asked, having equally funnily referred to Paris. Suppose she knew, suppose everybody knew, and all were in a conspiracy to watch her being allowed to go just as far as the station? The suitcase would be opened, the nightgown held up for sarcasm.