He looked at Sabrina, drinking her tea on the edge of the bed, reading her book over the brim of the cup, the pink satin folds of the dressing-gown framing her fragile throat—the small bones and delicate skin a clumsy man could bruise without knowing—and as he looked, he knew a surge of singing ecstasy which took him entirely by surprise, and opened up yet another vista before him.

He was in love with this little earthling, as surely and as deeply as though he had come back whole in his man’s body and found her living here in his home—a love so strong and inevitable that even death had not robbed them of each other. A mistake had been made somewhere and one bullet got astray to drop him in the desert. Then reparation was swiftly made, too, as far as it could go. He had returned to Nuns Farthing, and slowly the distance between them was narrowing, by her instinctive trust and faith in him, by his increasing comprehension of himself as he now was.

Thus he must study to fulfill his fractured destiny, and to make what refuge he could for her from disillusionment and disaster; to stay with her, however he could, as long as she needed him; to make of himself a sort of guardian angel, always with her growing knowledge and consent. And some day, late or soon, it would be his privilege and his responsibility to see that she made the crossing safely and willingly and without fear, into his perpetual care.

Also, as he watched her drinking her tea, taking no further notice of him but the more content because he was there, he realized that to accept this state of affairs as he did, philosophically, was not just making the best of things. Rather, it was to appreciate a perfection of intimacy that two people bound by flesh and blood could never know.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SABRINA’S cold did not materialize, and the next morning early she met the postman on her way down to breakfast. There was a copy of Antiquity for Father, and a large square envelope with a Swiss stamp for Aunt Effie.

Sabrina glanced at the latter in pardonable surprise and said, as she laid it beside Aunt Effie’s plate—”Who’s in Switzerland, Auntie?”

“Oh, Alan, it’s come,” said Aunt Effie, trying to catch his eye before Antiquity absorbed him.

“What’s come?” said Father, slitting the wrapper.

“The letter from Switzerland. I told you I had written. This is the answer.”

She tore it open with a glance at Sabrina, who was helping herself to kidneys and bacon at the sideboard hot-plate. There was a printed booklet on expensive shiny paper, and a rather long typed letter. Sabrina gave it a curious look as she sat down and began her breakfast in silence.

Finally—