He sat on the floor of the study until the window went gray.

It was the same floor. That was the thing he could not stop noticing, in the long slow hours after the sound of her footsteps had died away down the passage and the house had settled into a silence so complete that he could hear the clock on the mantel eating the minutes one at a time. It was the same worn carpet on which he had once kneeled at her feet with his palms open, and the same bar of white light had crept across it from the gap in the shutters and gone out. The same desk stood above him with its green lamp. On the blotter lay a folded page and a cream sheet in a dead man's hand, and between them, in the middle of the leather, small and bright as a drop of water, a plain gold ring.

He did not touch it. He did not touch anything. He sat with his back against the side of the desk and his knees drawn up and his hands hanging loose between them, as he had sat once as a boy in the east passage on the night after a funeral, and he let the dark come and go.

He was not weeping. He had wept, in the first hour, silently, as a man bleeds who has been struck somewhere that does not show, and then it had stopped, and what was left was only a great flat calm like the sea after a gale. He found that he could think. It was the strangest thing. He had been told once, by a surgeon on Pier Two with a cigarette behind his ear, that a man who has lost a limb feels nothing for a very long time but a kind of terrible clarity, and that this is the interval in which he must decide, quickly, what he will do with the rest.

At nine Marco had looked in. He had stood in the door with his hat in his hands and not said a word, and Matteo had not turned his head, and after a long while the door had closed again with great gentleness. At midnight, someone had set something down on the flags outside. At two, he had heard a heavy chair take a heavy weight in the passage and creak, and had understood that it would not be moved before morning.

At six the knock came. It was two knuckles, firm and unhurried.

"I have put a tray outside the door, sir," said Mrs. Venn's voice. "There is tea and an egg and a slice of the brown bread. I shall not say that you are to eat it. I shall say only that I have not been in the habit of carrying trays up two flights of stairs for the sake of the exercise."

He said nothing. He heard the small precise sound of a plate being set down on stone, and then her step going away, short and stiff and not steady.

After a while he got up.

His knees cracked. He stood in the gray light with his hand on the edge of the desk and looked at the ring, and then, very slowly, as one lifts a thing that might wake, he picked it up. It was warm. It had lain in the sun of a window for hours and was still warm, as though someone had been holding it. He closed his fist around it, and put it in the breast pocket of his waistcoat, over his heart, and buttoned the flap.

He opened the door. The tray stood on the flags. The egg had gone cold, and the tea had a skin on it, and Marco, in his shirtsleeves, with his coat rolled under his head, lay along three chairs with his eyes shut and his big arms folded, not asleep, and not in the least pretending to be.

Matteo took the slice of bread. He bit a corner off it and chewed it for a long time. It tasted of nothing at all. He swallowed it, and put the rest back on the plate.

"Marco," he said.

The eyes opened. "Sir."

"I have a list."

They did it in the library, with the shutters thrown back and the early sun lying across the green leather, and it took two days. He had said that he would do it, on his knees, in the room where he had kept her, and he found that doing it was a great deal simpler than saying it. It was only a matter of going down the page and putting a line through each of the things he had done in the dark. He said it to Marco in a plain level voice, in order. He wrote each one in his own slanting hand, and when it was written he put a date beside it and a name, and when the page was full he began another.

The cards came first.

They were in the bottom of the study cabinet, tied in a bundle with white string. Fourteen of them, one for every first Friday from April to June of the year before the pier, thin gray cards with a firm's name embossed at the head. Observation, Alder Street. Observation, Calloway Street market, Saturdays. He had read each one a dozen times. He knew every line by heart. He carried them down to the kitchen at ten o'clock on the Wednesday morning, with Marco at his shoulder, and Mrs. Venn, who was shelling peas at the pine table with a face like stone, looked up and saw what was in his hand and said nothing at all. She lifted the iron lid of the range. He put them in one at a time. They went up with a small dry sound and a thread of blue smoke, and he stood and watched until the last of them had curled and blackened, and then he put the lid back with his own hand.

"I should like to ask a thing," said Mrs. Venn, to the peas.

"Anything."

"Is it done with, sir? The watching?"

"It was done with in June of last year." He drew breath. "I should like it to be done with in every other sense. I do not mean to know where she is. I shall not ask Marco. If a thing comes to me that bears on her safety, I will hear it. If it does not, I will not."

Mrs. Venn nodded, once, stiffly. She went on shelling. After a moment a pea slipped from her thumb and rolled across the tiles, and neither of them looked at it.

The fund was a smaller matter, and he made it harder. Eleven thousand four hundred and some pounds, it had come to, and he had the exact sum in his book to the shilling. He wrote a cheque for it on his own account that afternoon, and then, because it did not seem enough, he sat at the long table and worked out the interest at the rate the bank would have paid a widow, over twenty months, and wrote a second. He took both to the Dockside Welfare Fund himself, in the plain gray car, and laid them on the desk of the astonished chief clerk with a letter that said in two lines what he had done and when. He did not ask for a receipt. He asked only that the amount be entered under its own name, and that it should be read aloud at the next meeting of the board.

On the way home he stopped the car outside a shabby building on Linnet Street with a brass plate beside the door, and sat looking at it for a minute. Hallam Inquiries. He went in. The proprietor, a small tired man with ink on his cuffs, came out of a back room with his hand already half extended, and Matteo did not take it. He paid what was owing. He took back the last of the files, and the negatives, and the ledger of the quarter, and watched while the man counted the contents of a cardboard box into his own two arms. "There is nothing else, Mr. Hallam," he said. "Not a note. Not a copy." He waited. The small man looked into his face and said, with an odd shaky dignity, that he had never been in the habit of keeping what he was paid to forget.

He wrote to Inspector Hollis that night.

It was a short letter, in his own hand, on plain paper with no crest. It said that he would be obliged for a quiet half hour at the Inspector's convenience, at the Inspector's own office or anywhere the Inspector chose, on a matter that touched the safety of several persons and the conduct of an old family friend. It said that he had no proof that would stand in a court, and a great deal that would not, and that he would rather be told so by an honest man than flattered by a clever one. He sealed it. He gave it to Marco, and for a moment, with the envelope between them, they looked at each other, and neither of them said what both of them were thinking, that it was a very long way from the study of Aurelio Bellandi.

The deed took him the whole of the Thursday.

He wrote it himself. He would not have Fenwick near it, nor any clerk, nor the dry gray cousin of a dead judge. He had read a hundred deeds of release in his life, and every one of them had a door in the lower margin, a small clause tucked under another, a condition or a proviso or a discretionary right. He knew how it was done. He had learned it at fifteen, at his father's elbow, in the study he was sitting in. This time he put down the plainest words that he knew.

I, Matteo Aurelio Bellandi, being the holder of the debt described in the schedule annexed, do hereby release and extinguish the whole of it, principal, interest, and all costs, in favor of Edmund Hale of Tern Street, unconditionally and for ever. No obligation of any kind is or shall be attached to this release. It is not conditional upon any act or forbearance of the said Edmund Hale or of any member of his family. It is not to be mentioned by me or by any agent of mine. It is a gift. The holder asks nothing.

He read it over twice. He crossed out a comma. He signed it, and Marco witnessed it in his large careful hand, and in a drawer of the desk he found the other paper, the half sheet of foolscap in his own firm writing, which a gentle voice had laid on a deal table in a basement. Hale, E. is to be held, not collected. He had not known that Dario had kept the original. He had a copy in his own file. He took it out, and laid it on the blotter in front of Marco, and then, slowly, with a hand that did not shake, he tore it across.

He tore it again. He tore it in quarters, and eighths. The pieces fell on the green leather like the petals of something. Marco watched them fall, and the great stolid face did a thing that Matteo had seen it do only once, at a graveside.

"Sir," said Marco.

"Yes."

"You are not to be thanked. I should like that understood." His voice was very low. "I have been twenty-two years in this house. I have driven you to every place that you have ever gone, and I did not once say to you, sir, I think you are wrong. I was afraid of the old man. I was afraid of you, in the end, when you grew into him." He swallowed. "And you are not to thank me, either. It would be a thing we should neither of us be able to bear."

"No," said Matteo.

"Then we shall say nothing."

"Nothing."

He put the deed into a plain white envelope. He did not write a name on it. He did not write a word of his own. He sealed it with a plain gray wafer, and held it for a moment between his palms, and then he laid it in Marco's hand.

"Tern Street," he said. "To Mr. Hale. Into his own hand, and no other. If he asks you who it is from, you are to say that it is from the house of Bellandi, and that it is finished."

There was one more thing, and it was the hardest.

He went down to the scullery on the Friday evening, after the rest of the household had gone to its supper.

It was a low whitewashed cell behind the kitchen, with a stone sink and a copper and a long wooden rack of dripping cloths, and a single high window that let in a square of the last of the daylight. A girl was standing at the sink with her back to the door. She wore a gray print dress with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and a coarse apron, and she had her hands in the water to the wrist, and she was not washing anything. She was only standing there. Her dark hair was pinned up under a cap, and he could see the back of her neck, thin and white and very young.

He had known her for two years by sight. He had not once, in all that time, spoken to her.

"Miss Brill," he said.

She turned. She did it all at once, with a small choked gasp, and her wet hands flew up to her mouth, and she backed against the sink until the stone edge caught her at the hip. She was eighteen. Her face was a child's face, round and freckled and swollen with weeping, and her eyes, when they came up to his, were huge and empty of anything but terror.

"Sir," she said. "Oh, sir. I'll go. I'll go this minute. Mrs. Venn said I might stay till the end of the week, but I'll go tonight, I'll pack my box..."

"Please," said Matteo.

He had not meant to say it so. It had come out of him low and rough, and she stopped. He stood just inside the door with his hands open at his sides and did not come any nearer. He had learned, in a hard school, how to stand so that a frightened thing might choose whether to bolt.

"I have not come to send you away," he said. "I should like that to be clear before I say anything else. You are not dismissed. You are not in any trouble with me. Nobody in this house is going to ask you for a single thing."

She stared at him.

"Mrs. Venn has told me that you have a sister in Carrow. Her name is Lissa, and she is twelve, and she had an operation two winters ago at a hospital in the capital." He saw her flinch, and went on gently. "Someone paid for it. I know who. I know why. I do not think you did."

"I didn't, sir," said the girl, in a whisper. "I swear I didn't. I only wanted her to live."

"I know." He drew a slow breath. "Miss Brill, I am going to tell you what will happen, and I should like you to hear it all, because I am not going to say it twice. The child's care will go on. The surgeon, the nurse, the medicines, the school if she wishes it. It is not a favor. It is not a debt. It will be paid by me, in my own name, from my own pocket, every quarter, as long as it is needed, and no one will ever call it in. You do not have to do anything. You do not have to listen at any wall. You do not have to say a word to me, or to anyone, ever again." He hesitated. "If you wish to tell Inspector Hollis what you heard, on the night of the sixth of December, and what was done with it, I shall go with you. If you wish to tell no one, you will tell no one. It will be yours to say."

The girl did not move. She stood rigid against the stone, with water running from her fingers on to the floor, and her mouth working. He saw it begin in her chin. It spread upward through the whole small freckled face like a crack through a plate.

"Why?" she whispered. "Why would you?"

"Because I have spent my life doing the other thing," said Matteo, "and I find that I am very tired of it."

She made a sound like a hurt animal, and covered her face with her wet hands, and the whole thin body shook. He did not go to her. He stood still, a long way off, with his own hands open and his own throat aching, and he let her cry. The light went out of the high window. After a long time the door behind him opened, softly, and a short stout woman in a black dress came in without a word and put both her square arms round the girl and held her, rocking a little, as she had held him once, in a winter passage, when he was twelve.

"Go on," said Mrs. Venn, over the girl's cap, very low. "Go on, child. I have her."

He went out. In the passage, Marco was waiting with a lantern. He did not ask, and Matteo did not say, and they went up the back stairs together in the dark.

It was Saturday afternoon when Edmund Hale opened the envelope.

Sienna was in the shop. She had put on her mother's apron and set herself to count the brass fittings on the shelves, because it was a task that required no thought, and she had got as far as the fourth drawer of eyelets when the bell tinkled and a very large man in a dark coat stood on the threshold with his hat in his hands.

She knew him by his shadow. She did not look round. She set down a little brass eye very carefully in its tray, and drew a breath, and heard her father come out from the back room wiping his hands on a cloth.

"Mr. Hale," said Marco. "I am sent from Cypress Hill, sir. I was told to put this in your hand."

Edmund took it.

He looked at it for a moment as a man looks at a snake of whose temper he is unsure. He turned it over. There was nothing on the face of it, no name, no crest, only a plain gray wafer, and he broke the seal with a thumb that shook. He drew out a single sheet. He unfolded it. And Sienna, who had not intended to watch, who was standing at the other end of the long counter with her back half turned and her hand on a drawer, saw his lips begin to move over the words.

He read it slowly. He read it as he read the Sunday paper, with a finger under the line, and when he reached the bottom he went back to the top and began again. Nobody spoke. The old ship's barometer ticked on the wall. A fly walked across the glass of the door. And at the third reading, suddenly, her father's big scarred hand went to his mouth, and a sound came out of him that she had heard only once in her life, on a day in a winter kitchen when he had sat with his coat on for a week.

"Marco," he said, thickly. "What is this?"

"I was told to say that it is from the house of Bellandi, sir." The big voice was even. "And that it is finished."

"It says..." Edmund's voice broke. He held the paper out at arm's length, and the sheet trembled like a leaf. "It says that I owe nothing. Nothing. Not a penny. It says it is a gift, and that he asks..." He stopped. He took off his glasses, and wiped them on his sleeve, and put them on again, and read it a fourth time. "God in heaven. Does the man know what he has done?"

"I believe that he does, sir," said Marco.

Edmund Hale sat down on the stool behind the counter. He did it all at once, with his knees, like a very heavy sack, and put the paper flat on the worn wood in front of him, and laid both his hands on it as one lays them on a Bible. And then, with great decorum, in front of a stranger and his only child, he put his gray head down on his arms and wept.

Sienna crossed the shop.

She did not say anything. She put her hand on his shoulder, and he turned his wet face up to her, and held out the deed with a hand that shook so that she had to steady it with her own. She read it. It took her very little time. It was a short document, and every word of it was plain.

She read it to the end, to the signature. M. A. Bellandi, in a firm slanting hand, and beneath it, in a larger, squarer, careful one, the name of a witness. She read it again. There was no clause. There was no door in the margin. She searched for it, as she had searched a dozen papers for a seam, with the whole of her trained and suspicious attention, and she did not find one. It was the most honest piece of paper she had ever held.

She did not say a word about it. She laid it down on the counter and squared it against the edge. She felt Marco, a few paces off, watching her face with an anxiety so profound and so carefully hidden that it had a kind of dignity, and she did not look at him. Her throat had closed. She could not have spoken if she had tried.

"Take it upstairs, Dad," she said at last, in a voice she hardly knew. "Put it in the tin with Mum's letters. And then make a pot of tea."

"Is it real?" said Edmund. "Sienna. Is it real?"

"Yes," said Sienna. "It's real."

He went up the stair with the paper held in both hands, like a man carrying a candle in a high wind. She heard his step on every tread, and the faint dull sound of a door closing. Then there was nothing in the shop but the ticking of the barometer and a large man in a dark coat standing on a doormat with his hat turning slowly in his hands.

"Marco," she said.

"Miss."

"Is there anything else?"

"No, miss." He did not look at her. "There is only the one thing. I was told to deliver it and to say nothing more, and I find that I have said a great deal too much." A pause. "He did not send a word for you. I should like you to know that he took particular care."

"I know," said Sienna.

It was true. She had known the moment she saw the plain gray wafer. He had had her whole life in his hands, in a drawer and a ledger and the margin of a page, and he had given back every inch of it, quietly, in a single sheet of paper, and had put no name on the cover for fear that she might feel it as a hand on her shoulder. She stood in her mother's apron in the green dusk of the shop and understood that it was exactly what she would have asked for, if she had known how to ask. And she understood that it was the cruelest thing he could have done.

He was not chasing her.

She had thought that it would feel like freedom. It felt like a door being closed, very softly, by a person who loves you, on the other side of a wall.

He went down to the boathouse on the Sunday evening, when the sun was low and the whole cove lay in a long slant of gold.

It was the only place he went now. He went at five, when the household was at its tea, by the gate in the kitchen-garden wall and the long stair through the cypresses, with no hamper and no companion, and he stayed until the light had gone. He did not work on the boat. He had tried, on the first evening, with a plane in his hand, and had stood at the trestle looking at the new pale strakes with their clean curved edges, and found that he could not make his fingers close on the wood. He had put the plane down. He had sat on an upturned crate in front of the stove, which he did not light, with the great doors open on the sea, and watched the tide come in over the black stones.

The little book lay on the bench.

He had left it there in December. It was the plain black one, bound in cloth, with a rubbed spine and thick cream pages, and a woman had given it to him in a drawing room with the snow coming down and said, it's blank. I thought, the other one is full of me. He had not written in it. He had told himself that he did not know what it was for. He had carried it down to the boathouse in his coat, in January, and laid it on the bench, and every Sunday since he had looked at it, and had not opened it.

He opened it now.

The pages were very clean. He ran his thumb along the edge of them and they whispered. He took a pencil from the tray among the chisels, a flat carpenter's one, and sat with the book open on his knee and his head bent, and the sea came up the stones, and went back, and came up again.

He wrote a word.

It was quite a short one. He looked at it for a long time, in the failing gold light, in his own small slanting hand at the head of a blank page. It was a name. It was the name for a boat that was twelve feet long and had no name, lying keel upward on a pair of trestles with half its planking stripped to the ribs, and he had known it, he thought, for nine months, and had never allowed himself to say it.

Then, very slowly and very carefully, with the flat of the pencil, he drew a line through it.

It was not his to give. He understood that, sitting in the dusk with the sea coming in. A name for a thing is a promise, and a promise is a kind of keeping, and he had made all the promises he had the right to make. He would put it back where it belonged, in her hands, and wait. If she never said it, then the boat would go nameless, and he would go on rebuilding her rib by rib for eighteen more years, and it would be the one honest piece of work that he had ever done.

He shut the book.

The lamp was burning in the shop window on the Monday.

He did not know it. It was Marco who told him, on the Tuesday morning, in the library, standing very straight with his hat in his fist and a face so carefully empty that it could have been carved.

"The lamp, sir," said Marco. "It was lit at seven on Monday evening. It is the signal that Miss Hale gave me. She has asked for me."

Matteo did not move.

"I went. It was not a long conversation." Marco drew a breath. "She asked me one question, sir. She said that she would not ask it of anyone but me, and that I was to take it to you exactly as she said it, and to bring back the answer, and to say nothing of my own."

"What was it?"

"She asked," said Marco, "whether you mean to go on with the fourteenth."

The room was very quiet. Outside, a long way down the hill, a church bell struck the quarter.

He had known that it must come to this. He had known it for days, with the part of his mind that went on working under the grief, as a man goes on counting stairs in a burning house. There was a date, and a hall, and a man in a sand-colored coat who would stand at the head of a table with a silver cup. He had thought it all through in the long nights. He had thought that he would put it off, and that Dario would choose another night, and another, and that sooner or later a clever old man would find a door that had not been shut. He had thought of a woman in a ruined gown on a Persian rug. And he had thought of a thing she had said, in a long room above a quay, with her whole body shaking. You told me you'd never decide for me what I could bear.

He sat down at the long table. He took a sheet of the plain paper, and a pen, and he wrote six lines in his own hand without a pause. He read them over once. He sealed them in a plain white envelope and gave it to Marco, and Marco took it as one takes a hot coal in a handkerchief, and went out.

He was back within the hour.

He did not speak. He crossed the library to the table, and held out a single sheet torn from a small blue notebook, folded once. It was not sealed. Matteo took it. His hand was steady. He unfolded it on the green leather.

She had written one word. She had written it in her small hard capitals, with a firm pen, in the middle of the page, with nothing before it and nothing after.

Yes.

He looked at it for a very long time. He did not weep. He folded the sheet with great care, along its crease, and laid it inside the book of favors that lay open at his elbow, and put his two hands flat upon the cover. Marco stood at the other end of the table with his eyes on the ceiling.

In his waistcoat pocket, over his heart, a ring lay warm against his ribs. He pressed his palm to it, lightly, through the cloth.

"I should like," said Matteo, "a cup of tea."

"Yes, sir," said Marco. His voice shook. "I shall tell Mrs. Venn it is to be tested."