In after life, when Isabel was destined to look back on that day as the last day of her youth, she recalled no part of it more clearly than wandering up to her own room after an early tea to dress, and flinging herself down on her bed instead of dressing.  She slept next to Val.  But while Val’s room, sailor-like in its neatness, was bare as any garret and got no sun at all, Isabel’s was comfortable in a shabby way and faced south and west over the garden:  an autumn garden now, bathed in westering sunshine, fortified from the valley by a carved gold height of beech trees, open on every other side over sunburnt moorland pale and rough as a stubble-field in its autumn feathering of light brown grasses and seedling flowers aflicker in a west wind.  Tonight however Isabel saw nothing of it, she lay as if asleep, her face hidden in her pillow:  she, the most active person in the house, who was never tired like Val nor lazy like Rowsley!  Conscience pricked her, but she was muffled so thick in happiness that she scarcely felt it:  the fancies that floated into her mind frightened her, and yet they were too sweet to banish:  and then after all were they wrong?

Always on clear evenings the sun flung a great ray across her wall, turning the faded pale green paper into a liquid gold-green like sunlit water, evoking a dusty gleam from her mirror, and deepening the shadows in an old mezzo tint of Botticelli’s Spring which was pinned up where she could gaze at it while she brushed her hair.  The room thus illumined was that of a young girl with little time to spare and less money, and an ungrown individual taste not yet critical enough to throw off early loyalties.  There were no other pictures, except an engraving of “The Light of the World,” given her by Val, who admired it.  There was a tall bookcase, the top shelves devoted to Sweet’s “Anglo-Saxon Reader,” Lanson’s “Histoire de la litterature Francaise,” and other textbooks that she was reading for her examination in October, the lower a ragged regiment of novels and verse—­“The Three Musketeers,” “Typhoon,” “Many Inventions,” Landor’s “Hellenics,” “with fondest love from Laura,” “Une Vie” and “Fort comme la Mort” in yellow and initialled “Y.B.”  There were also a big table strewn with papers and books, and a chintz covered box-ottoman into which Isabel bundled all those rubbishing treasures that people who love their past can never make up their weak minds to throw away.  She examined them all in the stream of gold sunlight as if she had never seen them before.  It was time to get up and arrange her hair and change into her lace petticoats.  If she did not get up at once she would be late and they would lose their train.  And it seemed to her that she would die if they lost their train, that she never could survive such a disappointment:  and yet she could not bring herself to get up and give over dreaming.