Free The Tiger in the Well by Philip Pullman Page A

London News, and a Jewish Chronicle. She was curious, now she thought about it, to read more about the Russian persecutions. The arms manufacturer Axel Bellmann, who'd been responsible for Frederick's death, had been backed by Russian money, and she'd taken an interest in that country's affairs ever since.
    Frederick . . .
    Sometimes, when she least expected it, she had the overpowering sensation that he was beside her,, and all she had to do was turn her head and she'd see him. It was a sense of utter conviction. She was not imagining it or daydreaming; he was there.
    She had that sense now, as she moved away from the newsstand, and it was so vivid that she gasped and turned half-around with eager happiness, and her lips had formed the start of 'Tred—"
    Nothing there. A dim, gray afternoon, a curious passer-by in a black coat, the crowded traffic of Fleet Street. No Frederick.
    But the sense of his presence didn't vanish at once. That instant flash of total happiness and certainty still illuminated things, as one of Webster's magnesium flares left a drifting image of itself in your eyes for a long time after it had burned up and died.
    She tucked the papers under her arm and set off for the station and home.
    That evening, Sarah-Jane Russell went to visit her married sister in Twickenham. Sally was alone, and for no reason she could name, she set about tidying up the breakfast room.

    It was the center of the home, the place where they sat in the evening and worked and read and talked, and where they ate except on the (very few) formal occasions when they used the dining room. It was the biggest room in the house, and it opened through French windows onto the veranda overlooking the lawn. It was part studio, part sitting room, part library. The one thing it wasn't was a laboratory. Webster Garland was fond of conducting chemical experiments, and the old kitchen at Burton Street in Bloomsbury, which had served as their sitting room when they lived there, was often pungent with fumes or smoke; but Sally had banished activities like that from the breakfast room at Orchard House.
    She turned the gas lamps up and cleared the great table first, putting away the atlas in which she'd been following their South American trip, and tidying all her work papers into the little walnut bureau by the window. There was a vase of flowers on the table, too, which Margaret had brought her; she put it on the mantelpiece, next to the wooden clock they'd brought from Switzerland the year before. Then the books, two neat piles of them. There were books everywhere in the room, but she'd kept these two piles as Webster and Jim had left them: in one a textbook of physics, an account of someone or other's travels to Bolivia, in German, and a German dictionary, with a feather in one, a scrap of litmus paper in the other to serve as bookmarks. She put them on the little revolving bookcase by Webster's chair. Jim's books were penny dreadfuls for the most part, lurid shockers with titles like Skeleton Gulch or Wildfire Ned. She smiled as she picked them up, thinking of his pride when one of his stories was published for the first time. There was a copy of Great Expectations, too, and Redgauntlet. She put them all on the bookshelf that ran the length of the wall, and then took up the painting on the easel by the door.
    Webster had bought it not long before he left, and hadn't yet had it framed. It was a little oil sketch by Camille Pissarro, one of the Impressionists: sunlight on a suburban road on a spring morning, and such freshness and vigor in the light

    that you could almost feel the breeze on your face that was making those little dabs of flake white scud along the blue. Webster had bought the Impressionists from the time of their first exhibition five or six years before, recognizing in their experiments with light some of his own concerns with recording the passage of time through photography.
    Well, this Pissarro would have to wait until