Rain was still falling outside, the gray windows were darkening, and the air was chill and dim. For the first time the room’s silence was loud. Fright crept into her eyes— here, where she had always felt so safe and cherished. Something had gone out of the room, something friendly and protective, and in its place was emptiness, strangeness, and doubt.

She began to back towards the door, with wide, watchful eyes, as though the room might try to stop her....

Alice was looking at her. The sphinxes were watching—smiling—waiting. The little brown pipe lay there beside them, waiting. Tobacco in the jar getting stale— his clothes, left hanging where moth could get at them— the letter to Thompson, never finished, never sent—what would Thompson think?—the calendar, static at June 5, two years to the day—but a man didn’t just walk out for two years without packing his things—where had he gone?—where was he now?—what had taken him out of the room on the fifth of June and never let him come back?—how much longer would they all have to wait....

When Aunt Effie came home from the sewing circle, she found Sabrina lying on her bed, and sent for the doctor. Sabrina lay very quietly, with her eyes wide open. Her lips were cold and bloodless. She would say nothing except that she didn’t feel very well.

The doctor said it was a slight chill on the liver, and left some little white pills.

CHAPTER FOUR

MIST was creeping in over the Embankment from the River. Not an old-fashioned fog, for it was June in London. This was just a white blur, hanging still and muggy—a come-by-chance summer mist, local and ephemeral.

Big Ben had just struck ten P.M. when the policeman passed Cleopatra’s Needle—which in fact has never had anything to do with Cleopatra— and glanced up as was his habit into the calm, bronze face of one of the attendant sphinxes. Same old thing, still there. It seemed to gaze beyond him, down river, waiting—but friendly in its very immobility on its low pedestal; dependable, changeless, receptive, content. The policeman liked the sphinxes. He liked to think of that quiet regard, unblinking and serene amid the noise and confusion on the night of the air raid in 1917 when a bomb struck nearby and flying fragments of steel scarred and pitted the base of the column. Mentally the policeman always saluted the sphinxes as he passed by on his rounds.

The Embankment was nearly clear of strollers tonight, in the freak mist, where from under one lamp post you could barely make out the glimmer of the next. In the policeman’s wake, but unaware of him and unseen by him, a solitary young man moved aimlessly westward.