He went back up to the sitting room and went in. There on the dining-room table, which they kept folded against the wall opposite the fireplace, she had left a tray. He went over and looked at it. Brown bread and a slice of ham. She had taken the trouble to shape the butter into curly balls. A tomato. Three chocolate biscuits. The teapot was at the fireplace, sitting inside the fender with the cozy over it. He hurried over to the teapot and pulled the cozy off it, and carried it to the table and shakily poured tea into his cup and returned the pot to the hearth. It was too hot to set down on the table. He poured milk into his tea and drank it down quickly. He wanted another cup at once, but this time he carried the cup over to the hearth and filled it there. Then he sat down at the table and began to eat his way through everything on the tray. When everything was gone he felt better, although he thought he could have done without the third chocolate biscuit. He had been hungry, that was all. Famished. He wouldn’t mind having his tea from a tray like this every evening. He sat gazing at the ravaged tray and thinking about how she had smuggled it into the room while he was upstairs. It was clever of her. She had wanted him to have his tea but she had not wanted to face him. She had taken a lot of trouble over the tray.

He got up and went to the window. She was there, kneeling sideways to him by the flower bed that ran along the wall where the laburnum tree was. The laburnum had been there when they moved in, together with a yellow rose that was on the opposite side of the garden. Apart from the laburnum and the rose there had been nothing. The place was a wilderness when they first saw it, but Rose had seen immediately that it had the makings of a good garden. Her work in the garden was wonderful. Hubert did not know where she had got her knowledge of flowers. She was kneeling out there now, settling something, some little plant, into its bed. She was intent on placing the plant in its exact place, and she was as anxious at her work as though she had taken the future of the world between her hands and must set it right once and for all because there would be no second chance — no second chance for her, at least — to prove that if it was left to her, all would be well. For this moment the weight of the world was off her shoulders and in her hands.