“I was willing to take the responsibility,” she said, and went away.

But Aunt Effie was not. She ordered Sabrina to close the door at once and come down. She threatened to speak to Father about it. She enlarged on dreadful speculations as to what the family would say to this violation of the sacred terms of the lease.

Sabrina listened meekly, and the next afternoon while Aunt Effie drove into Wells for some shopping, Sabrina set her square little jaw and went back to the top floor room.

So, with Father still in ignorance, Aunt Effie deceived, and Mrs. Pilton looking the other way, her visits to the secret sanctuary continued, until she knew the room and its visible contents by heart. Sometimes it almost seemed as though she knew its owner too. Sometimes it was almost as though he himself was there in the room— waiting for her to come back to him. His dominant masculine personality which had put its imprint on his room was a thing almost tangible, as real as the persistent odor of good tobacco which clung about the worn brown pipe he had left behind on the desk.

In the beginning she kept to the middle of the road, as it were, and her invasions were made more or less on tiptoe. She would take a book from the shelf, carry it to the upholstered window seat where the sun fell warmly through the glass, and there, curled up among the cushions, sometimes with an extra one laid across her long silk legs for warmth, she would read, for as long as she dared be absent from below stairs. And then she would replace the cushions, return the book to the shelf, and with a last look round to make sure everything was exactly as she found it, she would steal away.

There were favorites of her own in his library, and hundreds of unknowns she meant to read. If he liked an author at all, he apparently never rested till he had got hold of everything that had ever been printed by him or her. The set was often miscellaneous, bought all at different times. But out-of-print early works had been tirelessly run down, and new ones purchased as they appeared, so that of contemporary writers whose first volumes were immensely vital and full of talent and have now become hard to get, the room was a gold-mine. She began to appreciate that priceless vein of pre-war literature, produced in an incredibly tranquil world where motor cars were still a luxury and aeroplanes almost undreamt of, when taxes and death duties were paid without tragic ruination, and when a comparatively prosperous peasantry relied on the paternal indulgence of a comparatively solvent squirarchy. It was a fascinating world, as remote to one whose memory went no further back than the General Strike as were the days of the Reform Bill or the Regency.