Jasper put Miss Peverell gently aside, and opened the door.
IV
It was a schoolroom. That was the first thing he saw, and for some reason it was the thing he remembered longest afterward: a long low room under the eaves with a sloping ceiling and two dormer windows, and forms and desks pushed back against the walls, and a pair of globes on a shelf, and a row of samplers pinned up to dry along a string — *A is for Apple, B is for Bee* — each one a little more crooked than the last. There was a smell of chalk and wet wool. There was an old square pianoforte in one corner with a cat asleep on the lid.
Rupert Saltash was sitting at the master's table in the middle of the room, with a sheet of paper before him and a pen in his hand. He had taken off his gloves. He looked, Jasper thought, like a man settling an account at his club.
And at the far window, with her back to the light, stood Imogen.
He had told himself, on the long road down from London, that he would not know her. Seven years was a long time. She had been eighteen. She would be twenty-five now, and she had been poor and alone and frightened for most of it, and those things changed a face. He had prepared himself, quite carefully, for a stranger.
It was no good. He would have known her anywhere. She was thinner, and she wore her hair scraped back plain under a widow's cap, and there were lines at the corners of her mouth that had not been there before. But she stood exactly as their mother used to stand, with her hands folded at her waist and her chin up, and when she saw him in the doorway her eyes went wide and dark and then, very slowly, perfectly blank, the way a window goes blank when someone inside draws the shutter.
"Jasper," she said.
That was all. Not *brother*, not *thank God*. Only his name, quite flat, as if she were reading it off a list.
"Immy," he said. It was what he had called her when she was small. He had not meant to say it.
Something moved in her face, very far down, and was gone.
Saltash had risen. He did it unhurriedly, setting down the pen, and when he turned to the door his face was arranged into lines of grave and courteous regret.