Michael had not reckoned on his brother’s marriage, either.  It was when he asked himself:  “On what, then, had he been reckoning?” that the sweat broke out on his forehead.

He had not reckoned on anything.  But the sudden realization of what he might have reckoned on made him sick.  He couldn’t bear to think of Ronny married.  And yet again, he couldn’t bear to think of Nicky not marrying her.  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 the hill.

One larger light burned in the room that was their marriage chamber.  Jean and Suzanne, the refugees, stood in the white porch to receive them, holding the lanterns that were their marriage torches.  The old woman held her light low down, lighting the flagstone of the threshold.  The old man lifted his high, showing the lintel of the door.  It was so low that Nicholas had to stoop to go in.