“Anyway, it’s not a very cheerful subject for such a bright morning, is it!” Aunt Effie chided her playfully. “I think it would be nice if you took a little stroll in the warm sun—be sure to wear a hat, and wrap yourself up well, won’t you—while I do the ordering. The snap-dragons are coming out at last, the lazy things.”

Well, there it was again. Father making off into his study as soon as he had finished feeding, Aunt Effie refusing to listen. Not, perhaps, that one had anything important to say, but one longed occasionally to stretch one’s mind, to exercise one’s imagination out loud, discussing things one didn’t know much about. Else how was one to work things out for oneself, and find out how other people arrived at their own conclusions, and what these conclusions were?

In thwarted silence, Sabrina finished her boiled egg and bacon, two pieces of toast, well-buttered, decided against a second cup of lukewarm tea, and drifted out to the snap-dragons. Pale yellow, peach and pink and dark crimson, they stood in sturdy ranks along the border. She bent and pinched one to make it gape, detached a full-blown bloom from a pillar rose to pull through her belt buckle, and glanced up at the windows of the L-shaped room as she always did from that part of the garden. They were closed, of course.

All the bewildered mistrust of the room which had come upon her in the chill gray twilight of her last visit had vanished overnight, and she was able now to lay it to the weather, or to her illness, whatever it was, coming on. The rain and her own feverish imagination had tricked her. She felt again, and welcomed, the old familiar fascination. She must go up there, at once. The room was lonely, and must be aired out on a day like this.

She ran into the house and up the stairs. In the upper passage she met the housekeeper with a pile of fresh linen over her arm, and said a gay good-morning in return for a grave smile. At the foot of the second flight she paused and looked back in time to see the woman enter her room, the blue room. Sabrina turned round on a sudden impulse, and followed.

“Mrs. Pilton, do you ever hear from the family that owns this house?”

The housekeeper was preparing to change the bed linen. She went on working, unhurried, calm, deft, stripping back the covers, folding the sheets neatly as she removed them.

“Not often,” she said in her quiet voice. “The last time was when Mrs. Shenstone wrote to say your father had taken the house.”

“Was that when she told you to lock the room upstairs and not let us use it?”

“Yes. That was in the letter too.”

“She—she didn’t say anything about when he might be coming back?”