She glanced back suddenly at the door behind her. Mrs. Pilton, who had given her the key—he doesn’t want you to be shut out.... Then Mrs. Pilton must know. .

Muffin squirmed in her tense hold, and yowled as a rose stem jabbed him, reminding her that the wilting flowers should go into water at once. She set the kitten down on the floor and carried the roses into the bathroom. She was neat and competent and quick as usual in all her movements, but she wore the rapt, remote look of a sleepwalker. Blindly she found the tooth-glass, filled it with water from the tap, and bundled the roses into it. Her mind still refused to contemplate closely this thing which was happening to her. It was a thing so lucid and probable—so inevitable—and yet she knew with some far, dazed corner of her brain that Aunt Effie, for instance, would not think so. She told herself as it were parenthetically that Aunt Effie must never know about the dust-sheets. Mrs. Pilton might accept it, with her sublime composure. Mrs. Pilton was—well, perhaps used to him. But Aunt Effie would say she had been dreaming.

And at that word, Sabrina stood on the bathroom threshold with the cool glass of roses between her hands and that frantic pulse-beat in her throat, looking at the room again. It was not a dream, and the pile of dust-sheets was still there by the door. While on the hearth-rug, his small tail carried high, Muffin was purring loudly and rubbing himself against friendly legs, about the reality of which he himself had obviously no doubts at all.

Something inside Sabrina turned clean over then, with a throbbing thrill which nearly choked her—and was still. It left her knees feeling like wet tissue paper, and in its wake came flooding a warm sweet languor of peaceful certainty. She drew in a long, uneven breath almost a sigh, and passed one unsteady hand, damp from the tilted glass, across her eyes, like a child which wakes suddenly in a bright light. Hilary. Muffin had found him. Hilary stood there on the hearthrug—at last.

“You’ve—come home,” she said, and the knowledge raced and tingled in her own astonished body, as though for that brief moment of realization he had held her in his arms.

“And you’re glad,” he reminded her gently, seeing almost with pity how the roses quivered in the glass she held, and bow her eyelids betrayed her like a newly wakened child’s. “It’s all right, my darling—I’ve been here for days—”

A moment more she stood motionless, watching the empty air above the blissful kitten, unable to conjure up the faintest outline of what she knew must be there. Then with a reckless gasp of decision she started forward, one questing hand outstretched— “Don’t,” said Hilary firmly, without moving. “Don’t try to touch me.”