One wouldn’t have been afraid to say anything, try anything, go anywhere, with Hilary. The thing now was to stay as close to him as possible, never to lose him. Here at Nuns Farthing, which was his home, one was safe. Perhaps that was why Father had been led to take the house in the first place, though he would never guess it—just to bring her safe to Hilary. So that now, when she read novels like this one, about people who had all married the wrong ones and were making themselves and everybody else perfectly miserable about it, she hadn’t really got to worry because nothing of that sort could happen to her at Nuns Farthing....

Mrs. Pilton herself brought up the tea-tray, with a fragrant buttered crumpet under a cover, and a generous slice of fresh cake with icing—not forgetting Muffin’s tea-time thimbleful of milk in his own saucer. She glanced once round the quiet room and went away, closing the door softly behind her.

It was good China tea, and the aroma came to Hilary from Sabrina’s cup as she poured. She did not speak to him again, perhaps because it seemed less natural to her out of the room upstairs, perhaps because his presence was less real to her in this one. He wished he could make her understand that he was not wholly confined to his own four walls except by prudence—and, of course, Bella.

Coming down here today had proved for him an illuminating adventure, expanding their horizons as it did. In the ordinary way he would be smoking a pipe in that armchair, after a cup of China tea and a crumpet. It interested him to notice today that instead of his former somewhat wistful reflection that he no longer needed such things as tobacco or tea, he was now receiving somehow from the sight of her tray the essence of his palate’s one-time satisfaction. This set him pondering on what exactly he had retained of himself, and what he had left behind in a grave at Peshawur.

Sight, touch, hearing, and smell, and a memory of creature comforts—no, that was not quite right. Memory had very little to do with the satisfaction he drew from her appetizing tea-tray. It was as though, without the barriers of flesh and bone, sensation of all kinds reached him directly, acutely, in some distilled, immediate form, without hindrance. His mind was there, alive still, his spirit, once harassed by his body, was now free and quick and very aware. The pleasures he had enjoyed as a man all remained to him, accentuated, fined down—distilled.

All?