Page:The woman, the man, and the monster (IA womanmanmonster00dawe).pdf/216

 explored in her, and Smales was never again guilty of slipping the clutch in too quickly. Careful where care was required, dashing when told to let her go, he proved himself an ideal driver, and valuable in many other ways. It’s true his great, round eyes were always full of wonder when he looked at Andromeda, but the nature of that wonder she was never able properly to analyse. Nor did it concern her greatly, and after a little while even Perseus thought less of the singularity of the situation.

But the hotel began to pall on them both, and during one of their excursions in the neighbourhood of Frensham, in a quiet backwater of the world, as it seemed, deliverance presented itself in the shape of a thatched cottage, across the front of which the Virginia creeper was already beginning to redden. It stood back some hundred yards or so from the road, ‘and was approached by a well-worn track through the grass. Behind it rose a small, thickly-wooded hill, and behind this again, though this they could not see at the moment, was a wild spread of common land, purple with heather.

Andromeda called upon Smales to stop the