“We had better wait until the crowd thins out,” Robert said. “Then they’ll let us out the back way.”

He was wondering why Marion looked so grave; so unrejoicing. Almost as if she were suffering from shock. Had the strain been as bad as all that?

As if aware of his puzzlement, she said: “That woman. That poor woman. I can’t think of anything else.”

“Who?” Robert said, stupidly.

“The girl’s mother. Can you imagine anything more frightful? To have lost the roof over one’s head is bad —— Oh, yes, Robert my dear, you don’t have to tell us ——” She held out a late edition of the Larborough Times with a Stop Press paragraph reading: THE FRANCHISE, HOUSE MADE FAMOUS BY MILFORD ABDUCTION CASE, BURNT TO THE GROUND LAST NIGHT. “Yesterday that would have seemed to me an enormous tragedy. But compared with that woman’s calvary it seems an incident. What can be more shattering than to find that the person you have lived with and loved all those years not only doesn’t exist but has never existed? That the person you have so much loved not only doesn’t love you but doesn’t care two hoots about you and never did? What is there left for someone like that? She can never again take a step on to green grass without wondering if it is bog.”

“Yes,” Kevin said, “I couldn’t bear to look at her. It was indecent, what she was suffering.”

“She has a charming son,” Mrs. Sharpe said. “I hope he will be a comfort to her.”

“But don’t you see,” Marion said. “She hasn’t got her son. She has nothing now. She thought she had Betty. She loved her and was as sure of her as she loved and was sure of her son. Now the very foundations of her life have given way. How is she to judge, any longer, if appearances can be so deceptive? No, she has nothing. Just a desolation. I am bleeding inside for her.”

Kevin slipped an arm into hers and said: “You have had sufficient trouble of your own lately without saddling yourself with another’s. Come; they’ll let us go now, I think. Did it please you to see the police converging in that polite casual way of theirs on the perjurers?”

“No, I could think of nothing but that woman’s crucifixion.”

So she too had thought of it as that.

Kevin ignored her. “And the indecent scramble for a telephone that the Press indulged in the moment his lordship’s red tail was through the door? You will be vindicated at great length in every newspaper in Britain, I promise you. It will be the most public vindication since Dreyfus. Wait here for me, while I get out of these. I shan’t be a moment.”

“I suppose we had best go to a hotel for a night or two?” Mrs. Sharpe said. “Have we any belongings at all?”

“Yes, quite a few, I’m glad to say,” Robert told her; and described what had been saved. “But there is an alternative to the hotel.” And he told them of Stanley’s suggestion.

So it was to the little house on the outer rim of the “new” town that Marion and her mother came back; and it was in the front room at Miss Sim’s that they sat down to celebrate; a sober little group: Marion, her mother, Robert, and Stanley. Kevin had had to go back to town. There was a large bunch of garden flowers on the table which had come with one of Aunt Lin’s best notes. Aunt Lin’s warm and gracious little notes had as little actual meaning as her “Have you had a busy day, dear?” but they had the same cushioning effect on life. Stanley had come in with a copy of the Larborough Evening News which carried on its front page the first report of the trial. The report was printed under a heading which read: ANANIAS ALSO RAN.

“Will you golf with me tomorrow afternoon?” Robert asked Marion. “You have been cooped up too long. We can start early, before the two-rounders have finished their lunch and have the course to ourselves.”

“Yes, I should like that,” she said. “I suppose tomorrow life will begin again and be just the usual mixture of good and bad. But tonight it is just a place where dreadful things can happen to one.”

When he called for her on the morrow, however, all seemed well with life. “You can’t imagine what bliss it is,” she said. “Living in this house, I mean. You just turn a tap and hot water comes out.”

“It is also very educational,” Mrs. Sharpe said.

“Educational?”

“You can hear every word that is said next door.”

“Oh, come, Mother! Not every word!”

“Every third word,” amended Mrs. Sharpe.

So they drove out to the golf course in high spirits, and Robert decided that he would ask her to marry him when they were having tea in the club-house afterwards. Or would there be too many people interrupting there, with their kind words on the result of the trial? Perhaps on the way home again?

He had decided that the best plan was to leave Aunt Lin in possession of the old house — the place was so much hers that it was unthinkable that she should not live there until she died — and to find a small place for Marion and himself somewhere else in Milford. It would not be easy, these days, but if the worst came to the worst they could make a tiny flat on the top floor of Blair, Hayward, and Bennet’s. It would mean removing the records of two hundred years or so; but the records were rapidly arriving at museum quality and should be moved in any case.

Yes, he would ask her on the way home again.

This resolution lasted until he found that the thought of what was to come was spoiling his game. So on the ninth green he suddenly stopped waggling his putter at the ball, and said: “I want you to marry me, Marion.”

“Do you, Robert?” She picked her own putter out of her bag, and dropped the bag at the edge of the green.

“You will, won’t you?”

“No, Robert dear, I won’t.”

“But Marion! Why? Why not, I mean.”

“Oh — as the children say, ‘because’.”

“Because why?”

“Half a dozen reasons, any one of them good by themselves. For one, if a man is not married by the time he is forty, then marriage is not one of the things he wants out of life. Just something that has overtaken him; like flu and rheumatism and income-tax demands. I don’t want to be just something that has overtaken you.”

“But that is ——”

“Then, I don’t think that I should be in the least an asset to Blair, Hayward, and Bennet. Even ——”

“I’m not asking you to marry Blair, Hayward, and Bennet.”

“Even the proof that I didn’t beat Betty Kane won’t free me of being ‘the woman in the Kane case’; an uncomfortable sort of wife for the senior partne............