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enigmatic being. The tall privet hedge was featureless as a wall, its chubby leafy roundness flattened by the white light. In the orchard, round the corner towards Hood House, a few birds were tentatively calling, with a compelled despairing clarity. Monty then remembered the boy whom he had seen on the previous evening, standing in the Hood House garden in the twilight and gazing so fixedly towards the house. At first he had imagined for a crazy moment that it was Sophie. He so constantly expected to see her. Could one think so intensely of someone and not be visited? Can ghosts decide to manifest themselves, he wondered.
    It so often seemed to him that Sophie was in the house, a breathless quick presence whisking maliciously out of rooms just as he entered them. She travelled with him, already even now changing a little. Was she perhaps really travelling, receding, through some sort of dark echoing bardo ? For in that sleep of death what dreams may come ... If she survived as a tormented dreamer did she dream of him, and could her dreaming mind now somehow doom him? Was she wasting in resentful suffering now in death as he had seen her waste in life? Perhaps our thoughts hold the dead captive as they do the living; and perhaps their thoughts can touch us too. ‘What are you thinking?’ she had cried. ‘Oh how it maddens me not to know!’ Or was it he who had said that? Alive, their love had been a mutual torment. Death, which might have imposed a merciful silence upon this dialogue, had not done so. He had so often wanted to silence her thoughts. Were they silent now, or were they still gabbling away just on the other side of his awareness? Could not the survivor end this wicked servitude and set at liberty the frenzied ghost? How was this to be done? They had loved each other. How little this seemed now to avail. Love was itself the madness.
    How little he had helped himself by meddling with his mind this test told him. For years he had tried to control his dreams, to remain conscious while dreaming, to connect sleeping and waking. He had partly succeeded, making thereby the waking world less real, not the sleeping world more so. That was right in a way. But as so often, he had got hold of the wrong form of the right answer. Horrors swept freely in on him from the land of dreams, and what should have been wisdom turned into nightmare. All his spiritual efforts had been mere adventures ending in fright and muddle. After it all he was but an apprentice and his master was a sorcerer. Not even a very important sorcerer. Of course the little figure under the acacia tree could not possibly have resembled Sophie, though she was so small and had often seemed to him like a boy. Yet for a moment, in exquisite pure fear, he expected her to turn, expected to see her spectacles glinting at him like an animal’s eyes in the half dark. But of course it was just a boy. The fear remained however. Supposing the strange boy were to hear him and to turn round and look at him? Monty hurried silently back to Locketts, touching the reptilian trunks of the twisted orchard trees for comfort. Inside the house Milo Fane, cool, ironical, slit-eyed, mocked his pusillanimous scurry.
    As he now looked down into the relentless morning garden he recalled his mother’s promised visit. Underneath an unfailing lady-like politeness his mother had detested Sophie. His mother had doubtless willed Sophie’s death, who knows how ineffectually. The feeling had been mutual, of course, and Sophie had scarcely even attempted to be kind. She had a sort of foreign awkwardness with her mother-in-law which seemed designed to exasperate. Monty’s mother, who thought of herself as impoverished gentry, had been delighted by her son’s literary success but disappointed by his marriage. Sophie, though gratifyingly well off, came of a nebulous alien ‘flashy’ background of Swiss business people, which Mrs Small could not and would not attempt to understand. She