The boardroom was up three steps, and the lift would not reach them.

It was a quirk of the building that nobody had thought to mention. Seol Tower had been put up in 1993, and its ninth floor had been designed by an architect who wished the Board to enter its deliberations as a congregation enters a chancel, ascending. The corridor ran level to the double doors. Beyond them lay a small landing, and three broad shallow stairs of pale stone, and then the long walnut table and the empty chair with its brass nameplate. A ramp had been proposed in 2006 and voted down in 2007 by a director who said that it would spoil the line.

Madam Seol looked at the steps from her wheelchair, at a quarter to ten on the morning of the ninth of January, with the expression of a general surveying a river.

"It is three stairs," she said.

"Halmoni," said Ahreum.

"I have been up them several thousand times."

"You have a surgical wound."

"I have a very good surgeon," said Madam Seol, "who tells me that I must not be lifted by anyone who is not a professional. I have been thinking about what he said. It is a very sound principle. I am not at all certain that it applies to Mr. Yoon."

Hajin had been standing a pace behind her, in his charcoal coat, with his hands at his sides and a grey sky in the long window at his shoulder. He had put on the vest that morning, and done up the middle button, and had been conscious as he did it of an absurd and tender gratitude toward a piece of cloth. He had not slept more than three hours. He had not needed to. He had lain in a grey bedroom in Seongbuk with a woman's head on his shoulder and a telephone ringing on the floor, and he felt, in all the long bones of his body, a clear light dread, like a man who has been told that a thing he is afraid of will happen at ten.

"I said that I should carry the chair," said Hajin.

"You did," said Madam Seol. "Min repeated it to me at some length. I thought that it was a figure of speech."

"It was not."

"Ah." The bright eyes turned up to him, and something very old and dry moved at the corner of her mouth. "Then you had better take the left. Mr. Kwak has the right, and he is sixty-four, and has been weeping since Seongbuk."

"I have not," said Mr. Kwak, from the doorway, with enormous dignity, and blew his nose.

It was heavier than he had expected. He had pictured a light thing, a frail old woman and a folding chair, and it was a good steel frame, with a woman in a grey coat sitting upright in it holding a lunch box in both hands on her knees. He took the left side by the arm, and Mr. Kwak the right. They lifted together. She did not clutch. She sat quite still, like a person being carried across a stream in a ceremony older than either of them, with the navy cloth folded on the lid of the box and her chin up, and they went up the three stone stairs one at a time with the whole of the Board watching.

On the top step he felt, rather than saw, a charcoal sleeve come to rest against his own.

She was at his shoulder. She had been there all the way. She had walked up beside the chair in her good suit with her glasses on and her hair pinned, a hand's breadth from his elbow, not touching, not helping, and as they set the wheels down on the carpet at the head of the table she gave a very small breath that he heard, and nobody else.

"Thank you," said Ahreum.

"It was already in my hands," said Hajin.

They put her at the head.

The chair with the brass nameplate had been drawn back, and the wheelchair set in its place, so that SEOL SUNHEE stood engraved at her left hand and a small porcelain cup stood at her right. It was a plain white cup. It steamed. Someone had poured it five minutes before, in a hurry, and set it on its saucer with the handle turned toward her. He saw Min, in her black cardigan, at the foot of the table. She had not said a word. She had only looked at the cup, and at the old woman, and her round face had done the thing that it did.

For eleven weeks, in this room, a cold cup of tea had stood before an empty chair.

Madam Seol looked at the hot one. She put out her right hand and laid it round the porcelain, and held it there, and did not drink. She did not look at anyone. She sat very straight with her face turned toward the long window and the thin bright January sky, and the room, which had been murmuring, went quiet as a held breath.

Nobody spoke. Twelve directors sat along the walnut in their usual order. Chairman Pyo was at her right hand, silver-haired and upright, in a dove-grey suit, and his dry hands lay folded on the blotter, and he did not look at the cup either. Four observers sat against the wall. And three guests, who had never in the history of that room sat among them, had been given chairs by the window: a grey, exact, courteous man in his sixties with a mouth like a paperclip, and beside him a small woman in a navy suit who had once looked at Seol Yurim over her spectacles for a long moment in Jongno, and behind them a young man in a dark jacket with a recorder.

Chair Commissioner Hwang inclined his head to the table, a degree and a half, and said nothing.

Hajin took the seat that he had been given, third from the head on the left, and found that his hands, laid on the walnut, were not lining anything up. He had brought the three pens. They lay in his pocket, loose. He did not take them out.

At the far end, in a soft lavender jacket with her hands folded, sat Yurim.

She was not alone. There were the five others of her party in their places on either side. But there was a space round her, he saw, a small empty margin of polished wood, such as lies about a person at a funeral who is a little too near the coffin. She had not looked at the head of the table. She had looked at him, once, as he sat, and smiled, and the smile had come up a beat after her eyes.

He inclined his head, courteously, and did not count it.

"The Chair will open the meeting," said Pyo.

It was five past ten. He read from a single sheet in his dry unhurried voice, as he read everything, the voice of a man who had read forty such resolutions and been moved by none. He noted the presence of the Chairwoman, whose attendance had not been anticipated and whose health, he said, the Board was relieved to see. He noted the presence of the Commissioners, who attended as observers, by invitation. He noted that, under the Articles, the Extraordinary Resolution of the fourth of December stood as the only business on the agenda.

"The Chair will, however, with the leave of the Board, take one item before it," said Pyo. "It touches the integrity of the records of the Scholarship Fund, and it has been requested by a shareholder holding more than nine percent of the voting capital. I do not think that any director will object."

Nobody did. At the far end of the table Yurim lifted a pen, and put it down.

"The Steward of the Fund may be heard," said Pyo. "She holds no vote. She holds a voice. Director Seol."

Ahreum stood.

He had not known that she would. She had been sitting at the foot of the table by Min, in her charcoal suit, with her folder squared before her and her hands folded on top of it, and she rose without haste, and he saw that her right thumb lay on the seam of her cuff. It moved once. And then, deliberately, in front of twelve directors and three Commissioners, it came away.

"I am going to be very brief," she said. "I am not the best witness to what I have to say. I should like to call five who are better."

Narae went first.

She rose from her chair by the window in the grey coat, carrying the hard black case, and walked the length of the room with her head tilted a fraction to the left. She laid the case on the walnut. She opened the catches. She did not look at the far end of the table.

"My name is Ko Narae," she said. "I am a research fellow at the Institute for Learning Analytics in Singapore. Twelve years ago I was a student in Class 1-B at Eunseong Academy, on a scholarship, and I was accused of copying in an examination, and was removed from the school within the week. I should like to read what is written in the margin of the original charge sheet."

She took out the flat plastic sleeve. She laid it on the table, under the lamp, and Attorney Cha set the second print beside it, and a young clerk of the Commission's rose without being asked and put a small camera on a stand.

She read it in the voice that she used for her viva. It was clipped, and exact, and quite without heat. *Photo: angle ok. Head tilted L equals looks like copying. Thurs, third period, desk four.* She read it to the end. *Dr. J.H. says typed is better. More official. Type it. Do NOT put Father's name. Do NOT put mine. Principal's secretary can bring it. Say it came from a Seol. Keep the old girl out of it. She will make a noise.*

A pen scratched somewhere. A chair creaked.

"In the lower corner," said Narae, "where a signature might have been, there is a small drawing. It is of a rabbit." She laid a second sheet beside the first, and the clerk's camera turned. "This is a case note, dated the thirtieth of December, produced by the Strategy division. It bears an annotation in the same hand, and, in the corner, the same mark. Mr. Bae will speak to the handwriting." She drew breath. "I should like to name the person who drew them. I have been asked to do it in this room. I shall do it once."

She lifted her eyes, not to the far end, but to the window.

"Seol Yurim," said Narae. "She was fourteen."

The room did not move. It did not gasp. It did a thing that was much worse. It went very still, as the whole of a flock goes still in a field when something has crossed its shadow, and in the stillness Hajin heard the tick of the clock above the door, and the small dry click of a Commissioner's pen.

At the far end of the table, a pale hand had taken up a pencil.

He saw it from the corner of his eye. It lay on a pad of lined paper before Yurim, and it had begun, very quietly, with great delicacy, as a person does it who does not know that she is doing it, to draw. A round body. Two long upright ears. A tuft of a tail.

She was looking at the table, with her face composed. She did not seem to know.

Moon read his four pages standing, in a voice that shook, with both hands holding the sheets before his face. He said what he had said in a green room, and a good deal that he had not. Mr. Ma gave the log in a whisper, and then, after a glance at Cha, again, louder. And at twenty to eleven the screen was brought down from the ceiling, and a stocky tired kind-faced man in a white coat in a bright room in Daegu said that he had been seventeen, and had held the second phone, and that nobody had ever asked.

They played it. Not the fifty-two seconds. The whole of it, fifteen minutes and fifty-two, with the sound on. It went on in the great walnut room under the lamp, thin and tinny, with a tray going down on tile, and a roar of laughter like something in a cartoon, and a girl's voice, fast and flat and low, saying *Pick it up, and go.* He sat through all of it with his hands open on the table. He did not look at the screen after the first minute. He looked at the woman who stood beside it.

She stood quite still with her hands at her sides. She had not asked that it be shown. It had been Cha's decision, and the Chairman's. She watched her own face on the screen, at seventeen, with the whole of the rest of the room taken away and a boy walking out through a double door, and her thumb lay quite still against her cuff, and her eyes were dry.

When it ended, nobody said anything for a long time.

"I should like to say a thing about the fifty-two seconds," said Ahreum, into the silence. "It has been seen by a great many people, in a form that is accurate in every particular. I said *Delete it.* I said it to a boy of seventeen with a telephone in his pocket, so that there should be nothing for anyone to keep." She looked at the screen, at the frozen grey face of a dentist in Daegu. "I should not have asked him to. It was not mine to ask. I am glad that he did not."

On the screen, Gong Sangwoo put his hand over his mouth.

"If I may," said Yurim.

She had risen. She stood at the far end of the table in her lavender jacket, small and straight, with her hands clasped before her and her head a little bowed, and she looked so young, so soft, so sorry, that he felt the whole of the room incline toward her like a field in wind. The pad lay behind her on the walnut. There was a rabbit on it.

"I should like to thank everyone for their courage," said Yurim. Her voice was low and quick and a little breathless. "I know how much it has cost. I do not wish to deny any of it. I have only a few small things to say, and I shall say them as plainly as I can."

She drew a trembling breath.

"On the twenty-ninth of December I found a case note in the Fund's archive, when I was reviewing records for the Merit Pool. It concerned Mr. Yoon, and the Steward. It was accurate. I gave it to him in good faith, because I thought he ought to know. On the thirtieth, I did not send any clip to any forum. I was in the lobby at twenty past seven, as the log says, and I was on my way to the hospital. I asked Mr. Lim of Daon, on two occasions, to be attentive, because I was frightened for the Fund. I was not asking him to do anything that was wrong. I have no knowledge of the account called hanbit-svc." She paused. "I did not know that Mr. Bae had been following me."

It was beautifully done. It was also, he thought, every word of it true. He sat with his hands open on the walnut and examined it as one examines a very fine piece of work, and he could not find a seam. She had not sent the clip. She had not known the account. She had asked Mr. Lim to be attentive. She had laid them down, one by one, like stones in a path across a river, and the path led in exactly one direction, and not one of them was a lie.

He looked across the table at the woman at the foot of it.

Ahreum was standing quite still. She had put her hands flat on the folder before her, and she was looking at Yurim, and it was not the look that he had seen her give in a hundred rooms. It was neither cold nor courteous. It was nearer to the look of a person who is watching someone she loves cross a floor that she knows to be rotten.

"Every sentence you have said is true," said Ahreum.

It was said so gently that nobody moved.

"I should like it entered in the minutes that I do not accuse you of one false word. I have listened to every one of them for fifteen years, and I have learned how carefully you choose." Her voice shook, and she let it. "You did not send the clip. A woman you trusted did, from a machine on the sixteenth floor, with a key that you held. You did not know the name of the account. It was opened in your division's cost centre, and you have sat at the head of that division for four years. You asked Mr. Lim to be attentive, and he recorded it, and it was kind." She took a breath. "Added together, Yurim, they make a lie. I think that you know it. I think that you have known it every time you spoke."

There was no sound at all.

Yurim stood with her hands clasped and her face lifted. She did not speak. The smile began, as it always began, and halfway up the small pale face it stopped. It did not come the rest of the way. It hung there, a little crooked, and went out, like a light in a house where something has been very badly broken.

Mr. Gwon came in at five minutes past eleven.

He was eighty years old, and he had not been in an office on a Saturday since 1999. He came through the double doors on the arm of a young associate in a grey suit, a small bent man in an overcoat of an unfashionable cut, with a stick, and a leather satchel hung across his chest by a strap so old that the brown had gone black. He stopped on the landing and looked at the three stone stairs. He said something to the associate. The associate looked at him in dismay, and the old man, with an expression of the gentlest obstinacy, put out his stick and began to climb.

Nobody helped him. It occurred to Hajin that it would have been an insult. He went up the three steps with his stick on each, one at a time, with the satchel against his chest, and at the top he stopped, and drew breath, and walked down the long carpet to the head of the table, where an old woman in a wheelchair had set down her cup.

"Sunhee," said Mr. Gwon.

"Gwon-ssi."

"It is thirty-seven years."

"It is thirty-seven years in March," said Madam Seol. "You have grown very old."

"You have grown very obstinate." The wrinkled face did not smile. "I have kept it. I have not opened it. I have your instruction in my pocket. May I proceed?"

"You may."

He took out the paper. It was a plain white envelope, with a smudge of ink at the corner, and a flap that had been licked and pressed down with the heel of a thin hand. He held it up, and Madam Seol, without being asked, put out her own hand, and confirmed it with a nod, and said, in a voice that carried to the far end of the room:

"I, Seol Sunhee, a settlor of the Samil Heritage Trust, confirm that I gave this direction of my own will, in full possession of my faculties. It is long overdue."

He put the satchel on the walnut. He undid the strap. His fingers were so stiff that it took him some time. He drew out a thick bound ledger with a green cloth cover, and laid it flat on the table, and then, with the gravity of a man laying a body in a grave, stood back from it.

"Attorney Cha," he said. "I give it to you."

It took Cha twenty-two minutes to read.

He did it standing, at the head of the table, with his dry face composed and his glasses on the end of his nose, in the level voice in which he read contracts. He did not hurry. Hajin had known him for fourteen weeks, and had never seen him so entirely in the service of a document.

"The Samil Heritage Trust. Settled on the fourth of March, 1987, by Seol Jungsik, since deceased, and Seol Sunhee. Beneficiaries, eleven." He read the names. They were the lateral branches of a family, cousins, nephews, a widow in Daejeon, a dentist in Busan, and he read them as a man reads out the names of the dead. At the seventh he stopped. "Seol Jaehyun. Account designation J-07."

A stir went down the table.

"The account of Mr. Seol Jaehyun, who is the younger brother of the Chairwoman, was established in 1987 as an allowance. Until 2011 it shows regular quarterly drawings, modest, in line with the others. In March of 2012 it shows a single extraordinary disbursement of six million won, described in the ledger as a professional fee, paid to a Dr. J. Hwang of Seongnam." Cha lifted his eyes. "Dr. J.H."

Narae did not move. Her hand, on the lid of the black case, closed.

"It is the fee," said Cha, "of a physician who, the Commission's staff inform me, signed a number of certificates for the Seol family between the years 2009 and 2014. He died in 2016. I do not say what he certified in March of 2012. I say that the money came from J-07."

He turned a page. "In 2018 Mr. Seol Jaehyun suffered a stroke. The ledger records, in a clinical hand, that he has since been resident at a care facility in Gapyeong. On the second of March 2019, a power of attorney in respect of the whole of account J-07 was executed in favour of his daughter." He did not look up. "Seol Yurim."

The room had stopped. Hajin did not turn his head. He sat with his hands open and saw, at the very edge of his vision, a small figure in lavender at the far end of the table put her pencil down.

"From March 2019, every extraordinary disbursement from the account is made under instruction signed *S.Y., as attorney.* There are fourteen. The first, in May 2019, is for the incorporation of a Luxembourg company called Roux Participations, and the engagement of a nominee director. The second, in November 2019, is a courier retainer to a firm called Haneul Express. The third is the fee to the intermediary who, in the spring of two years ago, sold a nine percent holding in Seol Education Holdings to Maru Learning, at a price that the ledger records as being four point one percent below the market." He paused. "The ninth is the incorporation of Hanbit Advisory, in the Yeouido suite, five days before the first review of the pilot. The tenth and the eleventh are the vendor invoices in that company's name. All of it is on this page. All of it came from the same pocket."

Beside the Chairman, Pyo had closed his eyes.

"I did not know," said Cha, in a voice that was not quite steady, "that I should live to read this aloud."

"Chairman," said Madam Seol.

She had not raised her voice. It was thin and dry, and it went down the walnut like a wire.

"You asked Mr. Yoon on Wednesday to be told what the girl's father did. I find that I should like to answer it myself." The bright eyes turned. "He took a childless old woman's favourite project, and a child of his own, and he made the one into a weapon against the other. I did not see it. I did not look. He is my brother, and I had cut him out of the succession in 1994 in a corridor, in front of a clerk, because I was told that it was prudent. I have never said that I was sorry. I say it now, in this room, to a man who cannot hear it. It is not enough. It is the only thing that I have."

He heard her say it.

He sat with his hands on the walnut and his heart going slow and hard against his ribs, and he knew, with a clarity that was almost physical, that the moment had come. It lay on the table in front of him in a green cloth ledger. It lay in the quiet of twelve directors and three Commissioners, and an old man leaning on a stick. It lay in a pale figure at the far end of the table with a pencil in front of her and a rabbit on a pad, who had her eyes on nothing, and her hands in her lap, and her face as white as paper.

And it lay, quite plainly, in the voice of a woman at the foot of the table, who had put her hands flat on a folder and was looking at him.

"Hajin," said Ahreum.

The whole room turned.

She did not raise her voice. She said it as she had said it on a stair in the snow, in a charcoal coat, with her glasses misting, and the Chairman's dry head lifted, and a Commissioner in navy took off her spectacles. She stood in front of the Board of Seol Education Holdings with her thumb away from her cuff and her face quite open, and the whole of her was shaking very slightly, and she did not try to stop it.

"I should like to ask you to stand beside me."

It was out. It lay in the air of the walnut room, plain as a stone. It had no clause in it, and no ledger, and no vote. It was the first thing that she had ever asked of anyone in public, in the whole of her life.

"I do not ask for your vote. I have said that it is yours." Her voice cracked on the last word, and mended. "I ask for you. I am very afraid, and I should like to be afraid in the same place as you."

He stood.

He did not decide to. His chair went back on the carpet, and he was on his feet, and he walked the length of the table down the left side, past Director Jang and Director Ryu and the young man with the thin moustache, past Min, who had put her handkerchief to her mouth. He came to the foot of the table, and he stopped at her side, a little to the left. He did not stand in front. He stood so near that the sleeve of his coat lay against hers, and she did not move away.

"I am here," said Hajin.

He took the telephone from his pocket.

He had not planned it. He had told himself that he would say a few words and sit. He had come up in the lift that morning with a paragraph in his mind, courteous and exact, and it had gone from him on the third stair, like a coat in a wind. He held the small black thing in his hand, and he found the file, and he gave it to Cha, who without a word connected it to the screen.

It was the fifty-two seconds. It was the clean cut, with the red banner at the foot, SEOL FUND STEWARD ORDERED EVIDENCE DESTROYED, and a girl's white face frozen at the end of it. It rose on the wall above the walnut. Twelve directors looked at it. He heard Director Jang draw a breath.

"I should like to say a thing about this clip," said Hajin.

His voice was not the executive's voice. It was low and rough, and a little too quiet, and it did not know where it was going. He heard it with a kind of wonder.

"You have seen it. It has been all over the country for ten days. It has been said that it shows a girl ordering the destruction of a recording. She did. She did it to protect a boy. I know, because I have watched the whole of it, fifteen minutes, with the sound on, in a kitchen, and again this morning, in front of you. I should like to say who the boy was."

He did not look at the screen. He looked at the table, at the polished walnut, at the long reflection of the lamp.

"He was seventeen. He weighed ninety-four kilos. He had learned to hold a tray at the level of his stomach and to pull his jacket down to the hem, so that the line of it should not show. It was the whole of his strategy. It had worked, for four months." He heard a small sound beside him, and did not turn. "On the twelfth of October, at ten to one, in front of two hundred people, a boy called Do Kangmin stood up and said his name very kindly. And a hundred telephones came out."

The room was quite silent.

"That boy in the video," said Hajin, "is me."

It did not echo. It lay on the table, plain and small and quite level, and he felt it leave him as one feels a stone leave a closed hand. It was ten years old. He had carried it through four flats and two companies and a great many rooms with glass walls. He had made it into a name and a face and a fortune. He had thought that if it were ever said aloud he should die of it.

He was standing in a walnut room in front of the family that had made it, with his arms at his sides, and nothing had happened at all.

"I should like it entered in the minutes," said Hajin, "that the person who was humiliated in that cafeteria was Yoon Hajin, chief executive of Maru Learning, and that I am not ashamed. I was. I was ashamed for ten years. I built a company on it. I came back to this building to ruin the girl who said *Pick it up and go*, because I thought that she had said it to me." His voice shook, and he let it. "She had said it to the hundred telephones. She had said it so that I should be allowed to walk out. It was the kindest thing that anyone did for me in that school, and I did not understand it until I was twenty-seven."

He felt her hand.

It was not in his. It lay against the back of his, at the side, between the folds of the coats, with the little finger resting against the edge of his own, as it had lain once on a grey quilt in Jeju. She did not take hold. She only let it be there, as a person lets a lamp be on, and he felt the whole warm length of it go up his arm.

"I should like to say how Maru will vote," said Hajin.

Chairman Pyo had opened his eyes.

"Under Article 9.3(d), if the division of the Board is equal, the casting voice passes to the largest uncommitted block. It is equal, I believe, at six and six." He drew breath. "Maru Learning is that block. It has not committed. It has waited to hear the evidence, and it has heard it."

He looked down the table. He looked, for the first time, at the far end.

She was sitting very straight, in lavender, with her hands in her lap. The pencil lay on the pad beside the rabbit. She was looking at him, quite directly, and her face was bare. There was nothing laid over it. It was small and pale and very young, and her eyes were wet, and she did not seem to know it.

"Maru votes against the Resolution," said Hajin.

It was said plainly. He said it to her, and not to the Chair.

Nobody breathed.

Then, at the far end, at Yurim's left, a chair scraped. It was the young man with the thin moustache. He rose, very slowly, with a face the colour of paper, and stood with his hands pressed flat on the walnut.

"Chairman," said Director Shin, in a voice that cracked on the word. "I should like to ask leave to change my vote."

"The Chair will accept changes of vote before the result is declared," said Pyo. His voice did not alter. It had in it, very faintly, something that was not dryness. "The Director may state his new position."

"Against," said Director Shin.

He sat down. His hands were shaking so that they rattled on the wood.

A woman rose beside him. She was a heavy, grey, quiet person of fifty, in a brown jacket, who had not spoken at any meeting of the Board in eleven years. "Against," said Director Yoo, and sat. Beside her a third, a thin man in spectacles who had looked at his shoes since the clip began, got up and said it, to the table, and sat down so fast that the chair rocked.

"The Chair records nine against, three for," said Pyo.

He said it in a voice that was almost gentle. He let it lie. Then he laid down his pen.

"The casting voice is not required. The Resolution is defeated."

The room did not cheer. Nobody had expected that it would. It did a much quieter thing. It let go, all at once, with a small collective sigh like the sound of a great many people putting down a very heavy bag. Somewhere behind him a chair scraped, and Taewon, at the back, put his face in his hands. Mr. Lim, who had come in at half past ten and taken a seat against the wall, was blowing his nose with the enormous formality of a man who is not at all moved. And at the head of the table, in a wheelchair, an old woman in a grey coat took up a small white porcelain cup and, with a hand that did not shake in the least, drank.

He turned his head.

She was standing beside him with her hands at her sides. She was not looking at the Board. She was looking at him, with her glasses misted and her face quite wet and her mouth trembling at one corner, and she did not say anything at all. She only lifted her right hand, with the gold ring too large on its third finger, and laid it, quite openly, in front of twelve directors and three Commissioners, over the back of his.

He turned his hand over, and held it.

There was a long pause, and a murmur, and the scrape of a great many chairs. He did not hear them. He was aware of a small thin warm hand in his own, and of the faint rough edge of a ring against his palm, and of his own face, which was doing something that he had not given it leave to do. He was weeping. It was quite silent. It ran down his cheeks into the corners of his mouth, and he did not wipe it away. He had been told once, in a store-room, by a boy of seventeen, that a man should not be seen to need anything. He stood in the Board of Seol Education Holdings with his hand in a woman's and the whole of his face bare, and he was, he found, in need of nothing at all.

The chairs had stopped.

In the stillness, he looked down the table once more, to the very end, because it was the only place in the room that he had not yet looked. He thought that he would see her face. He would have known what to do with it.

She was alone.

It was a thing that he did not see happen. Somewhere in the last two minutes, at the far end of the walnut, the five directors of her party had risen, and gathered their papers, and moved, with a series of small embarrassed coughs, to the other side of the table. They had not looked at her. They had gone round her, as one goes round something that has been left in a corridor. The chairs on either side of her stood pushed back, empty, at an angle, with their leather seats a little warm.

She sat in the middle of them in a lavender jacket, small and straight, with her hands in her lap and a pad of lined paper in front of her. On it, in a single line, was a round body, and two upright ears.

She was looking at the empty chair on her right. She looked at it quite steadily, for rather a long time, with an expression that he would carry afterwards for the rest of his life, and could not have named. It was not rage. It was not grief. It was the plain, level, uncomprehending look of a girl of sixteen at a table by a window, with her hands folded, who has added a long column of figures and found, with a kind of mild astonishment, that the answer is nobody.