He couldn't help it. He knew it wasn't really funny; it was funny only because you could visualize the expressions of the persons concerned. He had collapsed against a tree, beating his hands on the bark. Jenny collapsed as well.
"But, Martin!" she insisted presently. "You've got to see the serious side as well!"
"If you can see the serious side of that, my sweet, you'd appeal greatly to Sir Stafford Cripps. Besides, you haven't told me the ending."
The ending is the serious side."
"Oh? Who won the race?'
"We did. By yards and yards and yards." Jenny reflected. "I'm perfectly certain Grandmother told Dawson to be ready. He was there at the lodge gates, where there's no lodge-keeper now. But the wall is fifteen feet high, and there are big iron-barred gates."
Prisons, it suddenly occurred to Martin: striking the amusement from his heart. Pentecost, Fleet House, Brayle Manor, all were prisons; though for the life of him he could not think how this applied to Fleet House, where the impression had-come only, from feeling.
He and Jenny were walking again through the mist A white tide of mist-under-mist washed across the grass, then revealed it ever moving. Its damp could be felt and breathed.
"Go on," he prompted. "What happened after your electric flyer got through the gates?"
"Dawson closed and locked them. Grandmother drove the car a fairly long way up the drive. After that she walked to the gates again. By that time she and H.M. too must have done a little thinking, because.. well, because it was different H.M. was sitting outside the gates on the seat of the farm-cart, with the whip across his knees and no expression on his face at all.