‘You know, Winter, it’s only just struck me that this car does look rather odd—spinsterish, and as if we ought to be wearing toques trimmed with autumn leaves.’

‘If I had to choose between a spinster and a chromium-plated strumpet—’ He broke off, and pointed ahead. ‘Look!’

‘Oh!’ Her exclamation sounded like a cry of pity. ‘Oh, Winter, is that Stonehenge?’

‘Are you disappointed?’

‘No! But somehow I feel so sorry for it. It is so small, so very small, and so neat.’

‘Amabel, you don’t know how I love you for things like that. You are the only perfectly sincere person I have ever known.’

He halted the car. Presently, he turned it and they drove away. She felt vaguely surprised. Winter’s spendthrift treatment of historical monuments was something she could not get accustomed to. Thomas her husband never quitted a castle or a waterfall (he had been equally prone to both) without having, as he said ‘thoroughly taken it in’. Thomas her stepson, though immune to nature and the Middle Ages, could take quite as long to absorb a portico, and talked much more. At times, she felt a certain nostalgia for the Serpell method of sightseeing. Though tiring to the legs, it was restful to the mind; there was none of 196this hit-or-miss, sharpshooting responsibility for saying the right thing. Having been so lucky with Stonehenge, she was the more anxiously aware of her inadequacies during the rest of the day’s journey, for when they turned aside for a manor house, she could think of nothing but living in it, and when Winter stopped the car with a shout of laughter before a Baptist chapel, she asked him what he was laughing at. Above all, she was estranged by the duplicity of the landscape, so intricate and so indeterminate. After the large, hymn-tune solemnity of the North of England, it was perplexing as a fugue.

She’s tired, Winter thought, and in his concern for her he lost his sense of direction, and took a wrong turning. He began to hurry, and so overshot a signpost, and had to turn back. It stood where the road branched left and right, and the left-hand pointer read, ‘Great Wimble 9, Oxford 31.’

Sighing with relief, he said, ‘There! Oxford. We shan’t be long now. After Wimble, we shall strike a main road.’ Even as he spoke, he noticed the right-hand pointer ‘Idenborough! I had no idea we were so near it.’

‘Ten miles,’ Amabel said. ‘And a dreadful road.’

‘Yes, but Idenborough at the end of it. It’s almost the loveliest small town in England, and there’s quite a good inn. Why don’t we spend the night there, instead of in Oxford?’

Amabel had read the name before he spoke it, and had been nerving herself to hear it spoken. It was at Idenborough, twenty years before, that she and Harry had spent a day, and two long autumn nights lying in a lumpy 197bed—so short a time, and yet outweighing all the rest of her life. She had gone there by train, abandoning her Thomases on the pretext of an old school friend just leaving for India. Blinded by excitement and sick headache, she had got out at a station on a branch line, where Harry was waiting on the platform, his face so stern with love that for a moment she had not recognized him, while he, glaring at the other end of the train, was so sunk in his conviction that she had changed her mind that she was compelled to take him by the sleeve and shake him before he noticed her. All rapture, all romance, and all leave-taking were sealed up under that word, Idenborough, and now it was a name on a signpost, and a place where she and Winter might spend the night.