Miss Hare would remember how she used to listen for the footsteps on the stairs. Very firm, rather heavy, relentless, they had seemed, until time and familiarity drew attention to the constancy of those sounds. Soon the woman lying in the room above could barely endure the tumult of her own emotions as she waited for the door to open. It was during a winter of the Second War that people-at least one or two of them-began to wonder what had become of that old Miss Hare. It was a harmless thought, and so, quickly dropped, until one morning, running through the frost across what had been the lawn at Xanadu, young Gracie, who, of all the Godbolds, had made that place her especial hunting ground, saw something at a window, and went and told her mum. Although she had not seen _much__, because of the dressing-table mirror jammed against the window, she thought she had recognized a piece of old Miss Hare. And Miss Hare had looked queer. Now, Gracie Godbold had never seen a ghost, but if she had, she knew it would have looked sort of misty-dirty like. So it was natural for the mother, a conscientious woman, to put on her hat, and sober coat, and go down to investigate. Nobody ever heard what emotions Mrs Godbold had experienced in the rooms and on the stairs at Xanadu. Discreet by nature, she was also uncommunicative. But she did at last, by peering and calling, arrive at the cell which contained the survivor, somewhere in the centre of that vast and crumbling comb. Miss Hare was lying on a bed of pomp and tatters. She said, "Mrs Godbold, is it? I have been feeling rather unwell for several days. But hope it will pass with patience. I do not believe in fussing and doctors, because, look at the animals. Oh, dear, but I become breathless, and it is terribly cold when the frost sets in." "I see," said Mrs Godbold, and thought. She began very soon to do things. Simple, but soothing, as accorded with her own nature. She made Miss Hare comfortable. She washed her at evening using a crystal basin the Hares had brought from Vienna-was it? — but long ago. She heated bricks and wrapped them in a blanket. And from the shed in which she lived, she brought, on that, and many evenings after, milk in a little white-enamelled can, a brown egg, and a slice or two from an enormous loaf. So Mrs Godbold nursed Miss Hare the winter the latter had pneumonia. Many people remained unaware, because Mrs Godbold did not talk, and Godbolds were no-hopers of the worst kind, and who, anyway, ever saw or spoke with that old, dirty, mad Miss Hare? Yet, she reappeared. She had begun, very tentative, supporting herself on the furniture, and, like a dog, listening for familiar sounds on the empty stairs. "You see, miss," said Mrs Godbold. "Soon you will be outside again." "Ah," said Miss Hare, "then I shall breathe." But quickly looked at her companion's somewhat flat and pallid face. "I shall be sorry, too," she added, "because you will come to me no more." Mrs Godbold made a little noise that was difficult to interpret. Then they glanced together, out of the window, at Xanadu, on which the mists had begun to hang, so that if it had not been for their own group of solid statuary, the world might have seemed at that hour ephemeral and melancholy. For Miss Hare, Mrs Godbold had become, and indeed remained, the most positive evidence of good. Physically she was too massive, and to some, no doubt, displeasing: too coarse, too flat of face, thick-armed, big of breast, waxy-skinned, the large pores opened by the steam from her copper. But nobody could deny Mrs Godbold her breadth of brow. She wore her hair in thick and glistening coils, and her eyes were a steady grey. As for her existence, that was endless. She knew by heart the grey hours when the world evolves, and would only rest a while to enjoy the evening star. Strangled by the arms of a weaned child, she was seldom, it seemed, without a second baby greedy at her breast, and a third impatient in her body. She would scrub, wash, bake, mend, and drag her husband from floor to bed when, of an evening, he had fallen down. "You will exhaust yourself," Miss Hare warned. "I am used to it," Mrs Godbold replied. "And am strong, besides. When I was a girl, we would work in the fields, and walk for miles. That was in the fens. Before I came out. Flat country, certainly, but it does not let you eat it up all that easy." She laughed. "We would skate, too, all of us girls and boys; we was nine in the family. We would skate across the flooded country during a hard winter, miles and miles, everything so brittle. The twigs on the hedges looked as if you could have broken them off like glass." Her eyes were suddenly brightened by what she was telling. Solidity in herself seemed to give to the glass twigs some mysterious, desirable, unattainable property of their own. Once while Miss Hare was feverish, and really very ill, she confided in her nurse, "I am afraid I may fall and hurt myself on so much glass. Will you let me hold your hand?" "Yes," agreed the other, and gave it. She might have severed it, if necessary, with its wedding ring and all. "Gold," Miss Hare mumbled. "Champing at the bit. Did you ever see the horses? I haven't yet. But at times, the wheels crush me unbearably." Mrs Godbold remained a seated statue. The massive rumps of her horses waited, swishing their tails through eternity. The wheels of her chariot were solid gold, well-axled, as might have been expected. Or so it seemed to the sick woman, whose own vision never formed, remaining a confusion of light, at most an outline of vague and fiery pain. "Never," complained Miss Hare. "Never. Never. As if I were not intended to discover." Whereupon she succeeded in twisting herself upright. "Go to sleep. Too much talk will not do you any good," advised the nurse. And looked put out, at least for her, as if the patient had destroyed something they had been sharing. "Oh, but I am ill," Miss Hare whimpered. Mrs Godbold let the silence slip by. Then, ever so gradually, she had ventured on a suggestion. "I will pray for you," she said. "If it will do you any good," Miss Hare sighed. "I hope you will take the opportunity. But leaves are best, I find, plastered moist on the forehead." Then she drifted off, and Mrs Godbold continued to sit beside her for a while. Evening was a perfect silence. The tranquil light, interceding with the darkness, held for a moment a thread of cob-web in its balance. When she was recovered, Miss Hare decided on one occasion to sound her friend. "I believe we exchanged some confidences while I was so ill." Mrs Godbold did not wish to answer, but felt compelled to. "What confidences?" she asked, turning away. "About the Chariot." Mrs Godbold blushed. "Some people," she said, "get funny ideas when they are sick." Miss Hare was not deceived, however, and remained convinced they would continue to share a secret, after her friend had returned to carry out her life sentence of love and labour in the shed below the post-office.