‘Oh – ’ said Marion.

Hilary nodded with vigour.

‘Looking about eleven feet high and too purposeful for words. I should think he’d just been seeing his mother and she’d been telling him what an escape he’d had, and how she’d been quite sure from the very beginning that I wasn’t at all suitable and would never have made him the sort of wife she had been to his father.’

Marion shook her head reprovingly. Hilary made a face and hurried on.

‘When I think that I might have had Mrs. Cunningham for a mother-in-law it gives me a creep all down my spine. What an escape! I expect my guardian angel arranged the Row on purpose to save me.’

Marion shook her head again.

‘Henry won’t expect you to see very much of her.’

Hilary flushed scarlet and stuck her chin in the air.

‘Henry won’t?“ she said. ’How do you mean, Henry won’t? We’re absolutely, finally, and completely disengaged, and I don’t care what he expects or doesn’t expect. And you’re not letting me get on with my story, which is most adventurous and exciting. And the only reason I said anything at all about Henry was because I’ve got a nice open nature and I had to explain why I bolted into a completely wrong train and didn’t notice where I was until we were well on the way, and then I found it was a corridor train, so I knew I’d done something silly. And when I asked the woman in the corridor corner where we were going, first she said Ledlington, and then she clasped her hands and said she’d recognised me the minute I got into the train.’

‘Who was she?“

‘Darling, I don’t know. But you ought to be able to place her, because it was you she really wanted to ask about. And at first I thought it was just curiosity, because she let on that she’d seen me with you in court – it must have been the afternoon Aunt Emmeline crocked up, because that was the only time I was there – and of course I just boiled, and got up to go and find another carriage, because ghouls make me perfectly sick. And then I saw she wasn’t a ghoul.’