Chapter 16: Mrs. Hartwell Redoubles Her Campaign

The fire in Cecilia's room had gone out by the time she finished writing.

She did not notice immediately. She was on her third page of the small notebook — the one with the marbled cover that looked, to any passing eye, like a household inventory — and the observations she was setting down required a precision that left no attention to spare for the temperature of the room. The four anomalies. The three silences. The expression, which she had promised herself she would not attempt until she was home, and which she was now discovering resisted categorisation in the warm as stubbornly as it had in the cold.

She wrote: his face, when she mentioned the priest's account, had carried something she was tempted to call recognition, except that recognition implied the information was new, and nothing in his manner suggested newness. It had looked, if she were being accurate, like a man who has read a line of verse in a language he no longer speaks, and found he still knows what it means.