On her way to the door she paused. There was something about luggage. You had to have luggage in order to get into a hotel. She turned back, pulled her dressing-case out of the wardrobe and flung overnight necessities into it. Then, with her coat draped over it the best she could, she tiptoed to the door and down the stairs. Aunt Effie would be in the kitchen now, doing the ordering. If one could get out of the grounds and catch the bus at the crossroads....

The cathedral clock was striking noon when she stepped down from the bus in the market place at Wells, trying to remember the way to the railway station, which she had never seen. Somewhere down to the left, she thought—one could ask at the Swan.... Another bus was loading, just where she stood. She raised her eyes to its sign. Glastonbury, and Street, it said. One day soon after they had arrived at Nuns Farthing she and Aunt Effie had driven over to Glastonbury and gone through the ruin with Aunt Effie’s guide book, backed up by Sabrina’s schoolgirl fondness for The Idylls of the King. It had been very peaceful and green and quiet, under the broken arches. Sanctuary....

With a grinding of gears the Glastonbury bus began to get under way. Its rear door stood open, folded back. Sabrina ran after it, jumped recklessly for the step, and was saved by the young conductor, who caught her elbow roughly and pulled her up.

“Mustn’t do that, miss,” he said. “Gimme quite a turn, you did!”

“I’m sorry. You do go to Glastonbury—?”

“That’s right, miss.”

She dropped into a seat by the window, and sat clutching her ticket and staring out at the green countryside, the bag on the floor at her feet cramping them sidewise.

Very soon the Tor came into view on the left, goal of so many million pilgrimages since the beginning of Christian time in Britain—a tiny tower, remote and unreal, on an improbable, pudding-shaped hill rising out of the misty water meadows where Lake Villages used to be; Avalon, Isles of the Blest, where Merlin wrought and Arthur died. Nobody would think of looking for her at Glastonbury.