‘I must, Martin. There’ll be such a lot to see to. I must go as soon as I possibly can. I ought to go to-night.’ The sooner she was out of the house the better. ‘You couldn’t possibly get there to-night by train. It’s such a beastly journey.’ He was struck with an idea and his face cleared a little. ‘I tell you what. Wait till after dinner and I’ll drive you back. If we started about eleven we’d be at your home soon after daybreak. Do, Judy, do. It’d be a marvellous drive. And I’ll break in on Mariella and cadge some breakfast. There’s so much to talk about. And if you’re going abroad we shan’t see each other for weeks. It’s most infernally disappointing, isn’t it?’ She agreed that it was. But as for the drive, that would be a marvellous arrangement. If Martin would send a wire to tell Mamma to leave the front door key under the mat, she would go and explain to his mother. As she left him, her heart felt almost light. Perhaps she could manage to wriggle out and escape now, after all. 7 Martin’s mother stood on tiptoe to kiss her good-bye, while Martin went to fetch the car. Her box was ready in the hall. She had given a last glance through the open dining-room door at the family portraits. She had been thankful to find them few and devoid of the likenesses she dreaded. They were just anybody’s respectable family portraits. Of the dead sister there was no likeness. Martin’s little sitting-room, with its photograph on the mantelpiece of a solemn Roddy in Eton clothes, its cricket groups including Roddy in flannels and a blazer, its painted green fire-screen decorated by Roddy with strange figures--that had been far more terrifying. She would not have to sit there now and look at Martin’s photograph and scrap albums, as he had suggested. ‘I’m sorry you must go,’ said his mother, charming and abstracted. ‘I’m sorry too.’ ‘But,’ she said gaily, ‘what a delightful idea, to drive through the night. Martin loves it, you know. I often hear him going off on a lovely night like this. Funny boy.... His horn sounds so dreadfully lonely it makes me want to cry. He likes to have a companion. I used to go with him sometimes, but I’ve had to give it up. I feel too old next day.’ She smiled sweetly; and suddenly, standing above her and seeing her so small and ageing, Judith felt no longer the great barrier of difference of generation, but the basic intimacy of their common sex; and with this an extreme tenderness and pity. She bent and kissed her--the poor thing, who must lie flat in her room thriftily husbanding her resources for the morrow, while she herself, coming thirty years of nights behind her, had the open dark for friend. She knew well enough you did not love her son: she trusted you not to betray him by marrying him. It would be horrible to force her to hate you ... unthinkable. Car-wheels grated on the gravel outside, and Martin sounded his horn.