When I came home my first impulse was to re-enter the classroom above the church. Everyone was sitting down there, although there was no lesson, and no teacher as I could tell. Through the leaded windows I had seen the yellow light and the bowed heads. I climbed up the stairs, and opened the door.

It was indescribably calm. I went up to the blackboard and wrote my name upon it. As I did so, the space behind me remained entirely silent. At last I put down the chalk and turned around. They were no longer seated; they had clustered about me, and I didn’t understand how they had managed to do so without my noticing. Everyone was smiling; everyone was welcoming me back. True, the smiles were a little forced at times, but I had been away for so many years it was impossible to pretend that nothing had changed. I shook their hands; I hugged them; I wanted desperately just now to forfeit all that had been achieved in the interim, so that I could slip back into the past we shared without interruption.

My daughter's friend got up at last; it was she I had really come back to see tonight. We had an invitation for her, something like that. But as she approached me, she was confusingly intercepted, and when at last she reached my side there were the beginnings of dewy tears coursing silently down her cheeks.

I realised that what had happened was the end of a motion - a thing that had been buzzing and making a shape about her in the still air, to which I had failed to attend.

"I always have to go to the hospital when this happens, " she said automatically, and I was moved and appalled by her impassive objectivity. Even if she had already forgotten it, I was still thinking of the obvious pain she must have suffered, and which had elicited that sharp cry as, sobbing, she stumbled along the line of the blackboard from the chalk-box to the end of the first column of desks.