Amanda sighed. “So that’s all right. He’s sitting on the top stairs with the phone and a mug of beer. Meg has left her door open and the moment it really is Geoff he’s going to call her. He’s furious about all this. I’ve never seen Sam ‘right angry,’ as he calls it, before.”
“Well, you know, it’s an evil thing, this attempt to reverse the process of mourning.” The Canon stepped back on to his own territory and became a different being. “Mourning is not forgetting,” he said gently, his helplessness vanishing and his voice becoming wise. “It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot. The end is gain, of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be made strong, in fact. But the process is like all o
