‘Could we?’ Katie said. It hadn’t occurred to her that they would be able to. Again she looked at Marek. ‘That’d be ideal, wouldn’t it?’ They would only have had to go and find lodgings in a house elsewhere and start again.

‘I can’t see why not, at least for the time being,’ Sybil said. ‘I’m sure we could arrange things – that is, if it would suit you, of course. It seems foolish to uproot yourselves, especially as your sister is next door now, Marek.’

Though she was trying to sound detached, as usual, Katie was touched to see an urgency in Sybil’s expression. She wanted them to stay: it mattered to her. Glancing at Marek and seeing agreement in his eyes, Katie said, ‘Sybil, that’s so kind of you. I’m sure we’d love to stay here. We’ve been very happy here, and Michael likes it – and we can always help you with the garden and everything. I’ll cook . . .’ As she said it, her spirits soared even higher. They would work out which was to be their private room in the house, but it was so lovely here, and she would have found it a terrible wrench leaving Sybil.

‘You are very good to us, Miss Routh,’ Marek said, with a little bow. ‘We are very grateful.’

‘Oh, not at all!’ Sybil pulled herself up from her chair and stood before them. Katie felt like embracing her, but didn’t quite dare to. ‘Your sister knows?’ she asked Marek.

‘Yes. We told her yesterday. She is glad.’

Sybil nodded. ‘And when is the happy day to be?’

‘We thought in the spring,’ Katie said. ‘May the fifteenth. It’ll only be very quiet – at St Francis’s. As long as the priest can marry us that day. I’ll make my own dress and everything.’

Sybil smiled at her eagerness and, stepping forward, kissed each of them on the cheek. It was so unexpected that Katie found tears in her eyes.

‘I hope you’ll both be very happy,’ Sybil said. ‘I’m very glad that you’ve found one another.’

It was a busy, exciting time. As well as the arrangements to be made, they were both working hard and making plans. Agnieska, who for the moment was working in a shop, had decided to apply to train as a nurse, and Marek sometimes talked about training too, in psychiatric nursing.

‘One day I shall do this,’ he said. ‘But for the moment I carry on earning my living – and I can be with you.’

‘What would you have done if the war had not happened?’ Katie asked both of them. Agnieska said she might have been a teacher, like her parents. But now she felt that nursing was something that was important to her. Marek thought he might have been a farmer.

‘But now everything is different’ was all he said.

Katie could see how much these choices were the result of what they had experienced, how much of the suffering of others they had witnessed, how it had changed them. They were both people of compassion, who wanted to offer the rest of their lives to help.