Thornyhold

by Mary Stewart

Happiness changes as you change. It’s in yourself.

The silence woke me.

Writers are queer cattle,

I had always been content to know that there was more in the living world than we could hope to understand. Now I found myself drifting on the peace of belief.

We did see Stonehenge. In those days it stood unfenced, deserted, small in the middle of the great Plain,

We had tea at Avebury, at an inn in the very centre of another circle so vast that the whole cannot be seen from any of its stones. Parts of it were lost in the fields round about, and a village with its roads and lanes cut here and there through the ring.

Six years, and whatever the loss, happiness steals back.

Animals were safer, and far kinder, than people. It was I myself, in my inadequacy, who was abnormal, not the simpler, more extrovert people with their robust attitudes to the natural world.

Since this is not a tale of midnight witchcraft, but a simple, a reasonably simple, love story, it is fitting that the final chapters should open on the morning of a glorious day.