“Doctors! Pigheaded, blundering fools!” said Father, and hid himself abruptly behind the Times. “Always think they know best!”

Sabrina left the table without a word, and went to her room and sat down there, sick and cold and faint. Her face felt rigid and drawn, as though she had never smiled, and never would again, yet her teeth were chattering behind tight-pressed lips and her eyeballs burned like coals.

Muffin came and got into her lap, digging in his claws, but she took no notice of him. He seemed to belong to someone else, someone she had known once, to whom he had been important and dear. He had no place in the desert where she sat. Life stretched out ahead of her, an unmitigated eon of ugliness. Perhaps after a while you got numb, and didn’t mind anything....

When Aunt Effie came up at tea time, bringing a large suitcase, Sabrina rose mechanically and began as requested to fill it with the contents of the chest of drawers.

Aunt Effie noticed with relief that at least she wasn’t crying, and went away again, more or less on tiptoe.

Sabrina went down to dinner when she was called, and sat through the meal in silence, staring at her plate, deaf to remonstrances. After dinner she went back to her room and began to walk up and down the floor aimlessly, her hands locked together. It was no good going up to Hilary now, she told herself. Under the pressure of her immediate misery, the contented hours she had spent in his company seemed completely unreal, and as distant as a dream. Like Muffin, Hilary had happened to somebody else, somebody who wasn’t here any more, somebody she had lost.

About ten o’clock Aunt Effie looked in at the door and advised her to get a good sleep, as they had to be up early tomorrow. Obediently Sabrina undressed and got into bed, where she lay with wide open eyes, watching the slow summer dark close in on the window. The night passed in a half-waking nightmare in which the Swiss school got mixed up with the Spanish civil war, and nuns were made to goose-step, and the ceiling of the dormitory fell in, and lastly she saw someone lying dead face down in a red pool of blood, and though she knelt beside him in terror she could not lift him enough to see his face, but she knew it was Hilary, and that he was really gone this time, entirely gone, and the world was empty of him— and then she woke.

It was seven o’clock. She reached for her dressing-gown and slippers, possessed once more by the old unreasoning need of Hilary’s own four walls—sanctuary— refuge from nightmare.

But Aunt Effie knocked on the door and showed a determinedly smiling face at the widening crack.