Suddenly it changed and became the ghost of a whistle—­the kind of sound one makes with the lips and teeth without ever letting the tune break out clear.  We all do it when we are preoccupied with something—­shaving, or writing letters, or reading the newspaper.  But I did not think my man was preoccupied.  He was whistling to quiet fluttering nerves.

Then I caught the air.  It was ‘Cherry Ripe’.

In a moment, from being hugely at my ease, I became the nervous one.  I had been playing peep-bo with the unseen, and the tables were turned.  My heart beat against my ribs like a hammer.  I shuffled my feet, and again there fell the tense silence.

‘Mary,’ I said—­and the word seemed to explode like a bomb in the stillness—­’Mary!  It’s me—­Dick Hannay.’

There was no answer but a sob and the sound of a timid step.

I took four paces into the darkness and caught in my arms a trembling girl . . .

Often in the last months I had pictured the kind of scene which would be the culminating point of my life.  When our work was over and war had been forgotten, somewhere—­perhaps in a green Cotswold meadow or in a room of an old manor—­I would talk with Mary.  By that time we should know each other well and I would have lost my shyness.  I would try to tell her that I loved her, but whenever I thought of what I should say my heart sank, for I knew I would make a fool of myself.  You can’t live my kind of life for forty years wholly among men and be of any use at pretty speeches to women.  I knew I should stutter and blunder, and I used despairingly to invent impossible situations where I might make my love plain to her without words by some piece of melodramatic sacrifice.

But the kind Fates had saved me the trouble.  Without a syllable save Christian names stammered in that eerie darkness we had come to complete understanding.  The fairies had been at work unseen, and the thoughts of each of us had been moving towards the other, till love had germinated like a seed in the dark.  As I held her in my arms I stroked her hair and murmured things which seemed to spring out of some ancestral memory.  Certainly my tongue had never used them before, nor my mind imagined them . . .  By and by she slipped her arms round my neck and with a half sob strained towards me.  She was still trembling.

‘Dick,’ she said, and to hear that name on her lips was the sweetest thing I had ever known.  ’Dick, is it really you?  Tell me I’m not dreaming.’

’It’s me, sure enough, Mary dear.  And now I have found you I will never let you go again.  But, my precious child, how on earth did you get here?’

She disengaged herself and let her little electric torch wander over my rough habiliments.

’You look a tremendous warrior, Dick.  I have never seen you like this before.  I was in Doubting Castle and very much afraid of Giant Despair, till you came.’

‘I think I call it the Interpreter’s House,’ I said.