Fifteen
“Your room’s ready,” said Sophia.
She stood by my side looking out at the garden. It looked bleak¹ and greynow with the half-denuded trees swaying in the wind.
Sophia echoed my thoughts as she said:
“How desolate² it looks….”
As we watched, a figure, and then presently another came through theyew hedge from the rock garden. They both looked grey and unsubstantialin the fading light.
Brenda Leonides was the first. She was wrapped in a grey chinchillacoat and there was something catlike and stealthy in the way she moved.
She slipped through the twilight³ with a kind of eerie⁴ grace.
I saw her face as she passed the window. There was a half-smile on it,the curving, crooked⁵ smile I had noticed upstairs. A few minutes laterLaurence Brown, looking slender and shrunken, also slipped through thetwilight. I can only put it that way. They did not seem like two peoplewalking, two people who had been out for a stroll. There was somethingfurtive and unsubstantial about them like two ghosts.
I wondered if it was under Brenda’s or Laurence’s foot a twig⁶ hadsnapped.
By a natural association of ideas, I asked:
“Where’s Josephine?”
“Probably with Eustace up in the schoolroom.” She frowned. “I’m wor-ried about Eustace, Charles.”
“Why?”
“He’s so moody⁷ and odd. He’s been so different ever since that wretchedparalysis. I can’t make out what’s going on in his mind. Sometimes heseems to hate us all.”
“He’ll probably grow out of all that. It’s just a phase.”
“Yes, I suppose so. But I do get worried, Charles.”
“Why, dear heart?”
“Really, I suppose, because mother and father never worry. They’re notlike a mother and father.”
“That may be all for the best. More children suffer from interferencethan from noninterference.”

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