Mamma might believe what Aunt Lavvy told her, that he had only gone to look out of the window and had turned giddy. Aunt Lavvy might believe that he didn't know what he was doing. But you knew. He had been afraid. Afraid. He wouldn't go up to the top-landing after they took Aunt Charlotte away; because he was afraid. Then, at last, after all those years, he had gone up. When he knew he was caught in the net and couldn't get out. He had found that they had moved the linen cupboard from the window back into the night nursery. And he had bolted the staircase door on himself. He had shut himself up. And the great bare, high window was there. And the low sill. And the steep, bare wall, dropping to the lane below. END OF BOOK FOUR BOOK FIVE MIDDLE AGE (1900-1910) XXXI I. She must have been sitting there twenty minutes. She was afraid to look up at the clock, afraid to move an eyelid lest she should disturb him. The library had the same nice, leathery, tobaccoey smell. Rough under her fingers the same little sharp tongue of leather scratched up from the arm of her chair. The hanging, half-open fans of the ash-tree would be making the same Japanese pattern in the top left hand pane of the third window. She wanted to see it again to make sure of the pattern, but she was afraid to look up. If she looked up she would see him. She mustn't. It would disturb him horribly. He couldn't write if he thought you were looking at him. It was wonderful that he could go on like that, with somebody in the room, that he let you sit in it when he was writing. The big man. She had asked him whether she hadn't better go away and come back again, and he had said No, he didn't want her to go away. He wouldn't keep her waiting more than five minutes. It was unbelievable that she should be sitting there, in that room, as if nothing had happened; as if _they_ were there; as if they might come in any minute; as if they had never gone. A week ago she would have said it was impossible, she couldn't do it, for anybody, no matter how big or how celebrated he was. Why, after ten years--it must be ten years--she couldn't even bear to go past the house while other people were in it. She hated them, the people who took Greffington Hall for the summer holidays and the autumn shooting. She would go round to Renton by Jackson's yard and the fields so as not to see it. But when the brutes were gone and the yellow blinds were down in the long rows of windows that you saw above the grey garden wall, she liked to pass it and look up and pretend that the house was only waiting for them, only sleeping its usual winter sleep, resting till they came back. It _was_ ten years since they had gone. No. If Richard Nicholson hadn't been Mr. Sutcliffe's nephew, she couldn't, no matter how big and how celebrated he was, or how badly he wanted her help or she wanted his money. No matter how wonderful and important it would feel to be Richard Nicholson's secretary.