Strange Recompense by Catherine Airlie Page A

out to the porch with gaily colored bags of confetti, he led her out into the sunshine and straight to his waiting car.
    He did not start the engine immediately, however, sitting with his arm along the steering wheel until bride and bridegroom appeared in the chapel doorway.
    Anna’s attention was riveted on the young couple, and Noel watched her as she sat still and erect, so still that she scarcely seemed to breathe at all. Then, slowly and painfully a single tear forced its way between her thick lashes and fell unheeded down her cheek.
    As if at some given signal, he swung the car clear of the line of traffic, out beyond the chapel and onto the open moor. Anna was still staring straight ahead, eyes completely remote, seeing nothing of the road before them, until he drew up on the brow of the hill overlooking the Mareth valley and turned to look at her.
    “What did you remember?” he demanded,
    “The church,” she gasped, and then she went on more slowly and more coherently: “When I first went in I wanted to run away.”
    “Why?”
    “I wanted to escape, I think. I—don’t think I wanted to get away from anyone in particular.” She clasped her hands tightly in front of her. “Oh, it’s so difficult to explain—to tell anyone—”
    “It isn’t difficult to tell me,” he insisted. “Why did you want to leave the church?”
    “I wanted to get away from something. It was like being shut up in a too-small room—closed away for life. I felt that I had been there before, that I had heard the organ playing like that before.”
    “For yourself?”
    She passed a trembling hand over her forehead.
    “I don’t know. Perhaps it was personal, that feeling, but I can’t be sure. I only know that I felt as if I were waiting for something dreadful to happen, that I had been there before and knew exactly what was coming, as one does in a dream.”
    “It often happens with the conscious mind, too.” he explained, “but go on. What was it you were waiting for?”
    “I can’t remember that. I don’t really know,” she repeated. “It was like a great dark pall rolling towards me, blotting out everything—the altar, the man standing there, the music and the sunlight streaming in across the aisle. I felt that I was going down the aisle and out at the church door—alone.”
    “What came after that?” He bent over her, willing her with all the force at his command to answer him. “Think, Anna! Think!”
    “I can’t!” She covered her face with her hands. “There isn’t anything left now but the blackness and the emptiness.”
    There was a tense moment before he relaxed, leaning back against the cushioning to produce his cigarettes, his eyes narrowed in thought as they scanned the deep green valley ahead.
    “Smoke?” he asked, proffering the case.
    She took a cigarette clumsily, imagining her companion making a mental note of the fact that she had not smoked a great deal from the way she handled it, and suddenly she was able to relax.
    “What a session!” she said unsteadily but without undue emotion. “How long before you give up altogether?”
    “One doesn’t ‘give up’ so easily as that,” he assured her, inhaling deeply. “To stop trying would be to acknowledge defeat, and this effort is still in its infancy. D’you know,” he added casually, “that hat is the emblem of the greatest day in my life! Ruth wore it at the graduation ceremony, and I can still see those two fantastic fully-blown roses bobbing for a vantage point in the middle of the hall. She had got herself a seat behind the fattest professor’s wife imaginable who was wearing a veritable fruit-barrow on her head and evidently wouldn’t give an inch!”
    “What did Ruth do in the end?”
    “She waved her programme so much that the fruit-barrow hat tilted forward and by sheer weight toppled into its owner’s lap!” They laughed as he started the car, and he thought with satisfaction that this was the second time in one day