It would be so simple, if only people would not interfere. All she wanted was to be allowed to go on as she was. Years at Nuns Farthing would pass swiftly and peacefully. The garden would get more beautiful with tending, and there were books in the house to last a lifetime. Gradually she would have become a middle-aged spinster, living contentedly between garden and library, with a descendant of Muffin’s in attendance, popular with the village children because she gave them sweets and let them picnic on the lawn and carry away all the flowers they liked. She would have been a nice old maid, she thought, not lonely and cross and unhappy like some, because there would always be Hilary. Surely it wasn’t such an unreasonable thing to ask, just to grow old gently in a house nobody else cared to live in....

Nuns Farthing. She contemplated its name curiously. There had been a convent once, she supposed—the home of other women who for one reason or another hadn’t felt equal to the world and only wanted to be left alone. It used to be quite a common thing, hundreds of years ago, for a woman who had lost her lover to become a nun. Even Guinevere, at the end, had found peace that way, renouncing Lancelot. There must still be places nowadays where you could go and be a nun. Switzerland—there must be convent schools in Switzerland—if once she could get to a place like that she could make the nuns understand, and then they would let her stay with them in peace....

She had no idea how long she sat there, with her face hidden in her arms. When she raised her head at last it was because there had come stealing across the grass on the still air, the faint, sweet drift of incense. She gazed round her slowly, at the crumbling walls and jagged arches, and the empty window-frames, which had not seen a service in three hundred years. But Sabrina sat there, strangely comforted, with the smell of ghostly incense in her nostrils.

The shadows stretched long across the grassy nave now, and the air was getting chilly. Sabrina realized that she was hungry, and it was nearly dinner time. She rose and shook out her coat and collected her dressing-case and put her hat right. That day last spring she and Aunt Effie had lunched at the Pilgrim Inn in the square. She would get dinner there, and take a room for the night, and perhaps in the morning she could decide what to do. Perhaps she would ask if they needed any extra help at the inn, and earn her keep. She would like to stay here for a little while, quietly, and think things out. She could post a letter to Aunt Effie from Wells, to say that she was all right. And she would not sign her real name in the hotel register.