‘So you ought,’ she said, turning round to look at the road. ‘Did you find the rings?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where are they?’

‘In my pocket.’

She put her hand into his pocket and took them out.

She was restless.

‘Shall we go?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he answered. And they mounted to the car once more, and left behind them this memorable battle–field.

They drifted through the wild, late afternoon, in a beautiful motion that was smiling and transcendent. His mind was sweetly at ease, the life flowed through him as from some new fountain, he was as if born out of the cramp of a womb.

‘Are you happy?’ she asked him, in her strange, delighted way.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘So am I,’ she cried in sudden ecstacy, putting her arm round him and clutching him violently against her, as he steered the motor–car.

‘Don’t drive much more,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to be always doing something.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll finish this little trip, and then we’ll be free.’

‘We will, my love, we will,’ she cried in delight, kissing him as he turned to her.

He drove on in a strange new wakefulness, the tension of his consciousness broken. He seemed to be conscious all over, all his body awake with a simple, glimmering awareness, as if he had just come awake, like a thing that is born, like a bird when it comes out of an egg, into a new universe.

They dropped down a long hill in the dusk, and suddenly Ursula recognised on her right hand, below in the hollow, the form of Southwell Minster.

‘Are we here!’ she cried with pleasure.

The rigid, sombre, ugly cathedral was settling under the gloom of the coming night, as they entered the narrow town, the golden lights showed like slabs of revelation, in the shop–windows.

‘Father came here with mother,’ she said, ‘when they first knew each other. He loves it—he loves the Minster. Do you?’

‘Yes. It looks like quartz crystals sticking up out of the dark hollow. We’ll have our high tea at the Saracen’s Head.’

As they descended, they heard the Minster bells playing a hymn, when the hour had struck six.

Glory to thee my God this night
For all the blessings of the light—

So, to Ursula’s ear, the tune fell out, drop by drop, from the unseen sky on to the dusky town. It was like dim, bygone centuries sounding. It was all so far off. She stood in the old yard of the inn, smelling of straw and stables and petrol. Above, she could see the first stars. What was it all? This was no actual world, it was the dream–world of one’s childhood—a great circumscribed reminiscence. The world had become unreal. She herself was a strange, transcendent reality.

They sat together in a little parlour by the fire.

‘Is it true?’ she said, wondering.