Ellie lost weight, her face pinched and eyes dark with sleepless nights. She often awoke just after midnight and all her childhood terror of the dark arose in her. There was no loving person now to come up with a candle and comfort her. Sometimes she slipped from her own room and crept into Mama's bed. It comforted her, the familiar smell, the moulded feathers of the mattress that bore her mother's shape, but as time went by, she felt unable to enter the room any more or look on that bed. It hurt her too much even to pass the door. The room remained firmly shut except to the maid who entered to clean and dust the sacred shrine, instructed to put everything back in its exact place when she had done.
Ellie's mind also returned perpetually to that perplexing, numbing time when Alfie had sudd
