Father was chilly and wanted his tea, so they stopped at the Swan in Wells, and went up a flight of carpeted stairs to sit at a table in a window which overlooked the lawn in front of the cathedral. It was a good tea, with strawberry jam and very superior cake, but Sabrina was feeling too odd inside to appreciate it.

“You haven’t eaten anything all day,” Aunt Effie complained, munching brown bread-and-butter. “At breakfast you were too excited about starting. I’m always a little excited myself about starting somewhere—though it’s much worse when one’s catching a train, I always think. But we’re nearly there now, so you ought to be able to eat something!”

Nearly there. Sabrina rested her eyes on the cathedral beyond its greening lawn—how motionless it is, she thought—and wondered at the tingling happiness which sang in her veins.

“Look, Sabrina, chocolate cake!” Aunt Effie urged her. “There’s all that unpacking and settling in to be done before dinner time—Alan, don’t you think she ought to eat a piece of this lovely chocolate cake?”

But Father’s mind was on Wookey Hole, which lay beside the road still ahead of them, northward, along the western rim of the Hills. Prehistoric man had refuged there from Mediterranean invaders. Bones of the mammoth and the bison and the reindeer, to say nothing of the urus, had been found in the caves. There was a museum. Father adored museums. “I supposed it would be foolish to stop there today, just for a swift look round,” he said wistfully. Aunt Effie said that it would, and filled his cup for the third time.

Sabrina sat quietly between them, her cheeks aflame from the wind, trying not to choke on the chocolate cake, which was dry and tasteless in her throat. She was not in a hurry—she knew no agonizing need to press on. Whatever it was had been waiting for her a long time, and would still be there when she came. And with this half-formed thought of it, another wave of dizzying sensation surged through her, so that she laid down the cake and fastened her eyes on the cathedral’s twin towers for steadiness.

“Well, let’s be getting on,” said Aunt Effie at last, brushing crumbs out of her tweeded lap. “We’ve got all summer to see Wells, goodness knows.”

It was not a lovely house, at Sabrina’s first sight of it, standing gaunt and gray against a barren hillside in the chill early twilight of that March day. Nothing much had been done about the garden, though a few bulbs seemed to be coming up. It was hardly late enough for lights, and the many casement windows watched them blankly as they came round the curve of the drive.