The station nearest to Coombe was on a small branch line, and when the train stopped at Exeter, Primrose pulled down her blue suitcase from the rack, pushed her way along the carriage and got out.
She neither joined the jostling crowd of people slowly moving towards the barrier nor did she make her way to the siding where the stopping train was presumably waiting. She stood near the shelter of the bookstall, not appearing to look for anyone, with her suitcase at her feet.
She was wearing a dark-blue wool dress with a coat of which the up-turned collar stood out round her long neck and threw up the pale colour of her uncovered fair hair gummed into elaborate and deliberately artificial-looking small curls, laid flat all round her narrow head like a coronal.
She had pulled on a short camel-hair coat and thrust both hands into the deep pockets.
Gazing downward, apparently at the suitcase, Primrose never raised her eyes until Colonel Lonergan, coming to a standstill directly in front of her, said:
"So there you are. Do you know it's the purest chance I was able to come and get you?"
Primrose gave him her one-sided smile and he picked up the suitcase and shouldered a way out through the crowd to where a very shabby and mud-bespattered car stood waiting.
"God, it's cold," muttered Primrose.
They were the first words she had spoken.
"Are you frozen, poor child? There's a rug."
Lonergan threw the case into the back of the car and wrapped the rug round Primrose as she settled down into the seat beside the driver's.
"Would you like to stop somewhere and have some hot coffee or some brandy or something before we start?"
"The pubs aren't open yet. We'll stop on the way, and have a drink. There's quite a decent pub about twelve miles out. Probably you've discovered it: The Two Throstles."
"I have."
He got in beside her and started the car.
"Are you glad to see me, darling?"
"Fearfully," said Primrose. "If you hadn't turned up I should have had to take a slow train and then telephone from the station for a car."
Lonergan gave a short laugh that sounded as though it had been unwillingly jerked out of him.
"You aren't going to turn my head with your flattery, are you, darling? Still in love with me?"
Primrose made no reply.
Lonergan took one hand off the wheel and sought hers.
She pulled off her loose glove with her teeth, keeping her left hand beneath the warmth of the rug, and gave him the right one. Its pressure responded to his touch immediately and electrically.
"That's my girl," said Lonergan.
He sounded content.
Primrose, without moving her head, slewed her gaze round so as to see his profile. Rory Lonergan carried his forty-eight years lightly. He was unmistakably an Irishman—not much above medium height, large-boned and heavily-built but without superfluous flesh. His dark, intelligent face had the characteristics of his race: clearly-defined black eyebrows and blue eyes, long, straight, clean-shaven upper lip and protruding under jaw. His voice was an Irish voice, deep and with odd, melancholy cadences, a naturally beautiful voice that betrayed the speaker's nationality at once by its un-English inflections, as well as by his choice of idiom.
"It's a sheer miracle that I was able to get away at all. And you didn't give me much notice, did you?"
"Are you staying at Coombe?"
He nodded.
"Luck's with us, darling. At least, I suppose it's luck. I'm moving up there to-night, with a lad called Sedgewick."
"You're moving up there now," remarked Primrose. "I suppose you're taking me there. Have you seen my family yet?"
"No. Hadn't you better give me the dope? I know nothing whatever about them. Young Banks made the arrangements."
Primrose, in an accentuated drawl, began to speak.
"I get pretty bloody-minded, I must say, on the subject of my family. That's why I never talk about them if I can avoid it. However, if you're going to be billeted there, all concealment is at an end, as they say. To begin with, Coombe is about the most uncomfortable house on God's earth—rather large, with big rooms for the family and dog-holes for the servants, no heating and the absolute minimum of electric light, one bathroom and never anything like enough hot water. It's idiotically run—feeble, incompetent little village girls taught to do a lot of useless, silly jobs that mean nothing, and cursed at when they want their evenings to themselves like other human beings."
"Who curses them?"
"Mostly my uncle, who lives with us, but my mama does the actual transmitting of the curses and doesn't even do that properly. She's afraid of servants."
The corner of Primrose's mouth twisted downwards contemptuously and her voice was coldly savage.
"Why do you hate your mother?" demanded Lonergan abruptly.
She took the question calmly.
"I'm not sure that I do hate her, though I despise her pretty thoroughly. If I hate her at all, it's reaction from having adored her as a small child. I was the only one for six years, and she used me as an emotional outlet, I suppose. It makes me sick to think of it. I had the guts to kick loose when I was, mercifully, sent to school."
"I thought girls of your class never did go to school."
"They do nowadays. I wish you wouldn't talk about class. It's a bloody word, denoting a bloody state of affairs that we're out to abolish."
"No one'll ever do that. Privilege may be abolished. Class distinctions won't, in England. They're ingrain."
"I couldn't disagree with you more than I do," said Primrose vehemently.
"Only the intensely class-conscious—like yourself, darling—would become so frantic on the subject. Go on about your relations. What did your mother do when you kicked loose?"
"What her kind always does. Looked more and more wistful and tried having heart-to-hearts that never came off because I wouldn't, and then got afraid of me. She's actually terrified of me."
"Of what you can do to hurt her," suggested Lonergan.
"I suppose so. Honestly, Rory, I don't set out to give her hell or anything like that, but I just come over utterly unnatural whenever we're within a mile of one another, and I hear myself saying the most brutal things and just can't stop. She embarrasses me so frightfully that I'm simply incapable of even looking at her, quite often."
"How is she embarrassing?"
"I don't know. She shows her feelings, for one thing. Or at least, she makes one know they're there. And she's so utterly incompetent—even more so than most of the women who were brought up the way she was. My grandfather was in the Diplomatic Service and she lived abroad till she married. I suppose that's helped to make her the dim kind of person she is—that and having a certain amount of French blood. Her name was Levallois. Mercifully both my sister and I take completely after the Arbell side of the family."
Lonergan kept silence.
After a minute Primrose said sharply:
"What is it?"
He gave her a look of appraisement.
"You're quick, aren't you. I was only thinking that I'd heard that name—your mother's name—Levallois—years and years ago, when I was an art student in Rome."
"That's right. They were there. Did you ever know them?"
Her