She went on brooding, her elbows on the sill, her eyes resting on the flower-studded garden below. Mornings like this, he seemed so near—especially today. After all, she reflected, people talked out loud to dolls and nobody thought that was queer. And after all, you prayed out loud and yet you didn’t see God—or expect Him to answer so you could hear.... One sometimes wrote letters to people one didn’t actually know, too. She had thought more than once of writing him a letter, about the room and—and about how she had come to feel about it. But even for a letter one needed to know his name, else George might get it, and one would hate that.

She turned her head slowly, and her eyes went dubiously round the room, blinking a little in the sunlight. If only there was a picture of him, it would seem more reasonable to pretend he was actually there and could hear if she spoke to him. Or if only one knew his name.... You couldn’t live in a room all your life and not leave your name somewhere in it—or could you?

She cast a helpless, ingratiating look round the four walls again, as if seeking him. Where could one look? Would he mind very much if—?

“If I could find his name,” she said wistfully, just above a whisper, “I think I could talk to him—sometimes.”

“My name is Hilary,” he told her, with a sudden, aching desire that she should know it.

The feeling grew on him minute by minute as he watched her that some sixth sense of hers would surely hear him, that already her sensitive, childlike perception had picked up some impression of his nearness and that she was glad of it. Minute by minute he was surer that his presence in the room she had made sanctuary was not going to come as a shock to her, and the knowledge bred in him a high exhilaration like a wind from the sea. If Sabrina did not mind his being there, if his homecoming did not drive her away, then he was not after all exiled and alone.

She had risen and gone to the desk, and now she stood looking down at the blotter.

“There’s that letter to Thompson,” she murmured, “only he didn’t sign it.”

“The phone rang,” he explained.

“I wonder who Thompson is.”

“You wouldn’t care for him,” he told her from the window seat. “He’s a member of His Majesty’s Opposition. He will probably see to it that questions are asked in the House about the very thing Dalton and I were trying to cover up.”