IT seemed to Sabrina a long time since she had first picked the lock of Hilary’s room. Did his being dead now make all the difference between a room you could break into and a room you must leave locked? It was still difficult to think of him as dead....

Slowly she groped her way to illumination. In the room he wasn’t dead. Something of him was there, would always be there, waiting for her. Slowly the conviction grew that since George’s visit—was it just her imagination?—since a little before George’s visit Hilary had seemed nearer than during the spring, while he was still alive. It was as though Hilary dead was nearer....

Wandering aimlessly along the border one morning, with Muffin under her arm and the warm July sun glinting on her fair hair, Sabrina began to see daylight in darkness. Why, then, it wasn’t going to be so bad, after all. He was not entirely lost just because his thick headed, thick-skinned brother drove up out of the blue to say he had been killed out in India.... But at that the old sick feeling began again, waves of chill and faintness. She fought it off, with clenched teeth and swimming eyes. To draw his curtains and put out dust-sheets and lock his door was nothing. Why, somewhere they must have buried a body that was his. But Hilary was here, at Nuns Farthing.

It was a boundlessly comforting idea. The game would be different now, for he was not going to arrive disconcertingly in a car—George had done that. Hilary would never come strolling across the lawn to her now, smiling and kind and terrifying—no, no, it’s silly to cry, Hilary is just as much here as he ever was. There would never now be that agonizing moment just before he spoke for the first time, when you would pray for the sort of voice and the words you wanted to hear from him. Hilary would never say the wrong thing now, never fail to do the right thing. He would be always perfect, and safe, and inviolate, in her own heart—no, no, don’t cry— Hilary will never go away now.

She had come to a standstill, gazing blindly at the dark red Richmond roses, which were a little heavy on their stems in the hot sun. The vases in Hilary’s room. Had anyone thought to empty them? Mrs. Pilton, of course. There ought to be Richmond roses in Hilary’s room today....

“I don’t think I care whether his mother likes it or not—and anyway, she needn’t ever know,” she said aloud, and Muffin purred against her side like a small warm dynamo. “We’ll try the lock again this afternoon while Aunt Effie is at Wells. And we’ll open the windows, and clear away the dust-sheets.”