When Thomas came north for Christmas, he brought his friend, Winter Gregory. Winter Gregory was a don, a kind of being Amabel had never set eyes on. She wished she had the sangfroid of her mother-in-law, who had never seen a don either but supposed he would eat and drink like any other mortal. After a couple of days, it was evident that he could fall in love like any other mortal, too. Amabel ceased to feel elderly, and refused his first proposal of marriage with such headlong vigour that the most cloistered and artless don might have taken hope from it. Winter was not notably cloistered. He had viewed with horror the bald solitaire diamond with which the deceased Mr Serpell had expressed his intentions of matrimony. The ring that he took with him on his second visit spelled out Regard with a ruby, an emerald, a garnet, an amethyst, another ruby and a quite moderate diamond. It looked very pretty on Amabel’s old-fashioned small hand. There seemed no reason why the hand should not immediately become his, but she evaded marriage for over a year, and was finally routed into it by her mother-in-law’s scorn for a woman of forty who hadn’t the spunk to take a second husband. Her rough 194tongue succeeded where Thomas’s encouragement had failed. Amabel had been abashed by the encouragements. It seemed to her like robbing a blind beggar to accept so much kind approval from her stepson when for the second time in her life she was violently in love, and on this occasion, too, not with his father.

The Rover preceded her to Cambridge. Thomas had given it to Winter as a wedding-present. This was so much what Thomas’s father would have done that Amabel had a polyandrous impression that Thomas’s father had almost done so.

Now, in the second year of their happy marriage, the car was swivelling along lanes and byroads whose banks were brooched with primroses and veined with the heavy blue of wild hyacinths still in bud. Winter had wanted to visit Amabel’s birthplace in Somerset. She had not seen it since her fifth year, when her father went to a London parish, and there was very little she recognized except an archway under which he had driven her hoop. She felt a complete stranger and sightseer. It was the Cockney Winter who knew Priddy in the Mendips and the sudden violent view of the Bristol Channel from the road above Clapton-in-Gordano, and who, saying calmly, ‘We shall find it down here,’ turned the car down a one-in-five rabbit-run. But it was Wiltshire, he said, as they crossed the county boundary—especially the unattended-to, undramatic country north of Salisbury Plain—that he was more at home in.

‘Stonehenge,’ said Amabel, catching at something she could be sure of. ‘I should like to see Stonehenge.’195

Without comment on her geography, he began to drive south-eastward toward the smooth rampart of the chalk. On the timelessness of Salisbury Plain, Amabel suddenly became aware that the Rover looked somewhat out of date.