On the other side of the gates a woman laughed.  The released prisoners were coming down the prison-yard.

The Cabinet Minister cranked up his engine with an unctuous glee.  He was boyishly happy because he and the Home Secretary had done them out of the Car of Victory and the thirteen white horses.

The prison-gates opened.  The Cabinet Minister and Drayton raised their caps.

The leaders, Mrs. Blathwaite and Angela Blathwaite and Mrs. Palmerston-Swete came first.  Then Lady Victoria Threlfall.  Then Dorothea.  Then sixteen other women.

Drayton did not look at them.  He did not see what happened when the Cabinet Minister met his wife.  He did not see the sixteen other women.  He saw nothing but Dorothea walking by herself.

She had no hat on.  Her clothes were as the great raid had left them, a month ago.  Her serge coat was torn at the breast pocket, the three-cornered flap hung, showing the white lining.  Another three-cornered flap hung from her right knee.  She carried her small, hawk-like head alert and high.  Her face had the incomparable bloom of youth.  Her eyes shone.  They and her face showed no memory of the prison-cell, the plank-bed, and the prison walls; they showed no sense of Drayton’s decency in coming to meet her, no sense of anything at all but of the queerness, the greatness and the glory of the world—­of him, perhaps, as a part of it.  She stepped into the car as if they had met by appointment for a run into the country.  “I shan’t hurt your car.  I’m quite clean, though you mightn’t think it.  The cells were all right this time.”

He disapproved of her, yet he adored her.

“Dorothy,” he said, “do you want to go to that banquet?”

“No, but I’ve got to.  I must go through with it.  I swore I’d do the thing completely or not at all.”

“It isn’t till nine.  We’ve three whole hours before we need start.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

“I’m going to take you home first.  Then I suppose I shall have to drive you down to that beastly banquet.”

“That won’t take three and a half hours.  It’s a heavenly morning.  Can’t we do something with it?”

“What would you like to do?”

“I’d like to stop at the nearest coffee-stall.  I’m hungry.  Then—­Are you frightfully sleepy?”

“Me?  Oh, Lord, no.”

“Then let’s go off somewhere into the country.”  They went.

* * * * *

They pulled up in a green lane near Totteridge to finish the buns they had brought with them from the coffee-stall.

“Did you ever smell anything like this lane?  Did you ever eat anything like these buns?  Did you ever drink anything like that divine coffee?  If epicures had any imagination they’d go out and obstruct policemen and get put in prison for the sake of the sensations they’d have afterwards.”

“That reminds me,” he said, “that I want to talk to you.  No—­but seriously.”