I suppose I’d better go down and snoop round a bit, he thought. Nobody ever tells me anything. He made quite sure that Bella was not in the upper passage and noiselessly descended his stairs, to hesitate outside Sabrina’s door—suppose he knocked?—and then, recklessly, he walked into the door and came out on the other side. That’s one useful thing I’ve learnt, anyhow, he congratulated himself.

But exactly as though he had opened the door and closed it again behind him, she looked up and knew he was there.

Wearing a soft pink dressing-gown and slippers, she was lying face down across the bed with her heels in the air and her chin in her hands, reading a book. And to his delight, she reacted instantly to her awareness of his presence by an instinctive clutch at the folds of the dressing-gown which fell open across her breast. For a moment, with parted lips and large eyes, one hand caught up against her throat, she stared towards the closed door.

His own reaction also was prompt and instinctive.

“Sorry, darling, I never meant to startle you,” he said, halting in his tracks. “Shall I go away again?”

Then, as Muffin bounded out into the middle of the room with his small tail erect and went to rub himself blissfully against those legs which were not invisible to him, she relaxed with a breath of laughter.

“Come in!” she said, with the mock formality of a children’s tea-party. “I wasn’t expecting you!”

Hilary stood grinning at her from near the door, Muffin purring round his feet. Her embarrassment, and then her self-possession, to the extent of clowning her welcome to him—this first glimpse of her dawning womanhood in dealing with a situation which he himself had created, enthralled him beyond anything he had dreamed.

“You are an enchanting person,” he said. “And I think, in the circumstances, it is my privilege to stay.”

She sat up, drawing her long silk legs under her on the bed.

“Ask your guest to sit down, Muffin, where are your manners? Tea’s coming up any minute. I only hope Bella won’t come with it!”

“Oh, damn the dog!” Hilary sighed, and sat down in the armchair by the dressing-table. The room smelt faintly of eucalyptus, and she had a rolled-up ball of handkerchief in one hand. But it was certainly not a drippy cold, she didn’t even look as though she had a cold, and—in fact, she looked as decorative in the pink dressing-gown as he had ever seen her. There was nothing to worry about, and he was glad he had come.

She thumped up the pillows and adjusted herself more decorously against them, with the book.