In another few minutes they had waved good-bye to the small figure on the steps, and taken the road. * * * * * Into the deep blue translucent shell of night. The air parted lightly as the car plunged through it, washing away in waves that smelt of roses and syringa and all green leaves. The moon struggled with clouds. She wore a faint and gentle face. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if there was rain before daybreak,’ said Martin; and, reaching at length the wan straight high road, accelerated with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Faster, Martin, faster.’ Faster and faster he went. She settled herself close against him, and through half-shut eyes saw the hawthorn and wild-rose hedges stream backward on either hand. The night air was a drug from whose sweet insinuating caress she prayed never to wake. Soon, through one leafy roadway after another, the headlights pierced a tunnel of green gloom. The lanes were full of white scuts and little paws, paralyzed; and then, as Martin painstakingly slowed down, dipping and twinkling into the banks. Moths flickered bright-winged an instant in the lamplight before being dashed to their fried and ashy death. Once or twice came human beings, objects of mean and foolish design, incongruous in the night’s vast grandeur; and here and there, under the trees, upon the stiles, in the grass, a couple of them, locked face to face, disquietingly still, gleamed and vanished. She observed them with distaste: passion was all ugliness and vulgar imbecility. Now the moon looked exhausted behind a gathering film of cloud. Soon came the rain, with a low murmurous hushing and whispering through the trees; and then a white blindness of lightning aching on the eyelids. ‘Shall we stop?’ asked Martin. ‘No, no.’ ‘I remember you hated lightning when you were a tiddler.’ ‘Do you remember that?’ ‘Yes. I shall never forget the day we were trapped by a thunderstorm in the old boathouse--you and Roddy and I. How you howled! And then you said you’d seen the lightning fall on Roddy’s head and had he been struck dead. I kept on yelling that if only you’d open your eyes you’d see him in front of you, as alive as anything; but you only went on shrieking. And soon we all of us began to believe Roddy might go up in flame any minute.’ ‘Oh, yes! I’d forgotten.’ She laughed. ‘I remember Roddy’s face, so solemn and red and doubtful as he felt the top of his head. He was terrified I was making a fool of him and he wouldn’t say a word. I asked him privately afterwards if he thought the Lord had visited him with a tongue of fire. He was disgusted.’ Martin threw his head back to laugh. ‘You were a comic child. We used to think you were a little mad.’ ‘Did you, Martin?’ she said, and doubt and sadness swept over her again. Perhaps even in those days Roddy had laughed at her, thought of her as a joke, never as a companion.