er. If he had had a hold on her he would have let her go. In this he
knew himself to be sincere. He had had no hold on her, and to talk about
letting her go was idiotic; still, there was a violent pursuit and
possession by the mind--and Michael's mind was innocent of jealousy,
that psychic assault and outrage on the woman he loved. His spiritual
surrender of her was so perfect that his very imagination gave her up
to Nicky.

He was glad that they were going to be married tomorrow. Nothing could
take their three days from them, even when the War had done its worst.

And then, with his mother's eyes on him, he thought: "Does she think I
was reckoning on that?"

* * * * *

Nicholas and Veronica were married the next morning at Hampstead Town
Hall, before the Registrar.

They spent the rest of the day in Anthony's racing car, defying and
circumventing time and space and the police, tearing, Nicky said, whole
handfuls out of eternity by sheer speed. At intervals, with a clear run
before him, he let out the racing car to its top speed on the Great
North Road. It snorted and purred and throbbed like some immense,
nervous animal, but lightly and purely as if all its weight were purged
from it by speed. It flew up and down the hills of Hertfordshire and
Buckinghamshire and out on to the flat country round Peterborough and
Grantham, a country of silver green and emerald green grass and purple
fallow land and bright red houses; and so on to the great plain of York,
and past Reyburn up towards the bare hill country netted with grey
stone walls.

Nicholas slowed the car down for the winding of the road.

It went now between long straight ramparts of hills that showed enormous
and dark against a sky cleared to twilight by the unrisen moon. Other
hills, round-topped, darker still and more enormous, stood piled up in
front of them, blocking the head of Rathdale.

Then the road went straight, and Nicholas was reckless. It was as if,
ultimately, they must charge into the centre of that incredibly high,
immense obstruction. They were thrilled, mysteriously, as before the
image of monstrous and omnipotent disaster. Then the dale widened; it
made way for them and saved them.

The lights of Morfe on its high platform made the pattern of a coronet
and pendants on the darkness; the small, scattered lights of the village
below, the village they were making for, showed as if dropped out of the
pattern on