He woke in a strange bed, in a gray room, with a clock ticking somewhere near his ear and the smell of cedar on the pillow.

It was a long time before he knew where he was. He lay on his back with his eyes shut, and the first thing that came to him was warmth. It lay over him like a hand. It lay along his side and under his shoulder and across his feet, and he thought, with the dim clear logic of the half asleep, that someone had put a heating pad in the bed. Then he thought: no. It is not that. It is the body that was beside me.

He opened his eyes.

The ceiling was white and plain. A pale gray light came in at the window, the light of a Sunday morning in the last week of November, with a thin cold sun somewhere behind a veil of cloud. The curtains had been left open. A square of sky showed above the wall of the next tower, silver and quite empty. On the shelf beside the lamp a small round clock with a worn white face said twenty minutes to nine. And beside it a little wooden frame stood with its back to him, turned a quarter inch toward the wall, so as not to catch the light.

He did not touch it.

He lay and looked at the back of it for some time. Then he turned his head on the pillow.

The other side of the bed was empty. The pillow was dented, and the gray cover thrown back, and a long faint hollow showed in the sheet where a man had lain. It was still warm. He put out his hand and laid it flat on the place, and felt the heat fade slowly under his palm. He had not heard him go.

The apartment was quiet. From the far end of it, very faintly, came the sound of a kettle.

He lay a moment longer.

He lay in a stranger's bed in the gray light, and felt, quite distinctly, happy.

It was a very odd sensation. He did not trust it. He turned it over, cautiously, and it did not crumble. It lay in him, warm and small and solid, like a stone that had been all night in a fire. He thought: I shall have to get used to this.

He got up, and found his trousers on the floor, and his shirt on the chair, folded. He put them on. He looked for his gloves, and remembered that they were in the other room, on the table, side by side, and that he had not worn them for sixteen hours. He stood for a moment in the middle of the floor with his hands hanging at his sides, and looked at them.

They looked like hands.

He went out into the passage in his bare feet.

The kitchen was full of light.

It came in at the long window, white and clear, and lay across the oak table in a broad bar. The table was laid for two. There was a pot of tea under a knitted cover, and a rack of toast, and a dish of butter, and a plate of sliced pears. A jar of marmalade stood open at the corner with a small spoon in it. And in the middle of it all, squared neatly to the edge of the wood, lay a flat gray envelope tied with string.

Luke stood at the stove.

He was in his shirtsleeves, with his back to the door, turning something in a pan. His hair was wet, and standing up a little at the crown. The collar of the white shirt had not been turned down at one side. He hummed, under his breath, an old tune with no words, in a low and tuneless and entirely contented voice, and Elias stood in the doorway and listened to it, with his shoulder against the frame, and could not say a word.

The humming stopped.

It did not stop abruptly. It faded, as a man's voice fades who has become aware of being watched. The spoon paused in the pan. The long back stiffened, a very little, and then, slowly, relaxed. Luke did not turn round. But his shoulders rose and fell in a long breath, and Elias saw the tips of his ears go pink.

"Good morning," he said.

"Good morning."

"I hope that I did not wake you."

"You did not."

"I thought that you would wish to sleep."

"I did." Elias came into the room. He crossed the tiles, and stopped at the end of the table, and laid his hand on the back of his chair. "I wished it very much. And then I found that I did not like the bed."

Luke turned.

He had a plate in his hand, with two eggs on it, soft and golden, and a fork. His face was flushed. His eyes were bright and a little shy, and there was a look in them that Elias had never seen on him in daylight. It was a look of such open, wondering, uncertain joy that it hurt to see. It was the look of a man who has been given a gift, and is half afraid that someone will come and take it back.

"It was not as comfortable as your own," he said.

"It was not that."

"Then what?"

"It was empty," said Elias.

The plate trembled.

It was a very small tremor. A single egg slid an inch across the china. Luke set it down on the table with rather more care than was needed, and straightened, and stood with his hands flat on the wood. He did not seem to know what to do with them. He looked at the egg. He looked at the pears. A wave of color went up from his collar to his hair.

"I did not wish to wake you," he said again.

"I know."

"I thought that I would make breakfast. It is a thing that people do." He drew breath. "I have never done it. I mean, I have made breakfast. I have not made it for, for the morning after."

"It is very good."

"You have not eaten it."

"It smells very good."

"It is only eggs."

Elias sat down.

He took the chair at the window side, where the light was strongest, and laid his hands on the cloth, and looked up. Luke was still standing. He looked very tall, and very young, and a little lost, in the white light, with his hair on end. He looked like a man in a house that was not his own.

"Sit down, Luke," said Elias, gently.

"Yes."

"Please."

He sat.

They ate in the long bright quiet, with the sun lying across the table and the river glittering far below. It was an extraordinarily peaceful meal. Neither of them said much. There was the small chime of knives on china, and the pour of tea, and now and then a slow shy glance across the table that was met, and held, and dropped. Elias found that he was very hungry. He ate both of the eggs, and four pieces of toast, and a pear, and drank three cups of tea. He could not remember when food had tasted of anything.

When he had finished, he sat back.

"There are rules," he said.

Luke looked up.

"I have been thinking about them. It is a habit." He turned the cup in its saucer. "I have rules for the work. I should like to have rules for this."

"This."

"The morning." A little color came into his own face. "The way that we shall live. I think that if we are going to do it, we had better say how."

"I should like that very much."

"The first," said Elias. "Nothing is said about the work until the first cup of tea has been finished."

A faint, astonished smile touched Luke's mouth. "That is a very reasonable rule."

"I am glad that you think so. I find that I am very bad before it."

"I had noticed."

"The second." He lifted a finger. "No one leaves this house without telling the other. Not for an hour. Not for a night. If you go to Albany, or to a hardware shop, or to the, to wherever it is that you go on Tuesdays." He saw the smile vanish. "I do not ask where. I only wish to be told that you are going. And when you will be back."

"Yes."

"And I shall do the same."

"Yes," said Luke, very low. "I think that I should like that more than anything."

"And the third." He drew a breath. "If one of us cannot sleep, the other shall be told. We shall not lie awake alone on opposite sides of a wall. I have done it for six weeks, and I find that I do not care for it." The color deepened. "You may knock. Or you need not even knock. You may come in. I should like you to come in."

For a moment Luke said nothing at all.

He sat with his hands clasped on the cloth, and his head bowed, and his shoulders were not quite steady. Elias saw the long muscle in his throat move. When he looked up his eyes were wet, and he was smiling, and it was an uncertain, crooked, radiant thing, such as a child's face wears after a great fright.

"Yes," he said. "I accept."

"All three?"

"All three. And I should like to propose a fourth."

"Go on."

"That no one apologizes before breakfast," said Luke. "It is a habit that I have, and I should like to be broken of it. I apologize for everything. I apologized to a doorman last week for the weather." His voice shook with a laugh. "It will be a great saving of time."

"Agreed."

"Thank you."

"That is an apology."

"It is a thank-you."

"It is a near thing."

They looked at each other, across the oak, and laughed. It was a small, soft, shaken laugh, and it went on a good deal longer than the joke deserved, and ended in a pair of unsteady breaths. Elias put his hand over his eyes. The sun was warm on his wrist. He thought that he had not laughed so, with someone, since he was a child.

He took his hand away.

"The ledger," he said.

Luke's smile did not vanish. It only grew quieter. He nodded, and slid the gray envelope across the table, between the teapot and the dish, and undid the string.

It lay in the sun.

He drew it out with both hands, as he had in the garage, and laid it on the cloth. It was a small thing. It was very plain. In the clean morning light the leather was the color of a chestnut, worn pale along the edges where a hand had held it. A thin brass buckle had gone green. He unbuckled the strap, and the book fell open, of itself, as a book does that has been opened often at one place.

"I have not read it," said Luke.

"No."

"I thought that you should be first."

"I know."

"It is yours."

"It is ours, I think." Elias bent over the page. "I should like you to read it with me. I am not able to do it alone. I should like you to see what he did."

Luke came round the table.

He stood at Elias's shoulder, and then, a little uncertainly, drew out the next chair and sat at his side, close enough that their knees touched. It was a very small contact. It sent a quiet warmth up Elias's thigh. He did not move away.

They read it together.

It was a plain ruled book, written in a slanting quick hand, with a pencil margin on the left and a column of figures on the right. It began on a page marked with a date, twelve years and four months before. The first entry was a small one. Payment, from the Trust to a firm called Marlin Associates. Three thousand four hundred dollars. For consultancy. Beside it, in the margin, in a smaller hand, a question mark.

The second entry was five thousand.

He turned the page.

It went on and on, in the dry dull beautiful script of a man who had decided to be patient. Every entry was dated. Every one was numbered. The sums rose, slowly, from thousands to tens of thousands, and then, in a column near the middle of the book, to hundreds. He could see the shape of it forming, as a picture forms in a pointillist's canvas, out of a thousand small separate marks. The firms that did not exist. The accounts that opened and closed within a week. A single name, in a bank's letterhead, at the foot of a dozen forms.

And on every page, in the narrow pencil margin, his father had written a note.

I am afraid that I am right.

Elias put down his finger.

He sat with his hand flat on the open page, and did not move. The sun lay on the table. The tea went cold. A long way down in the street a car horn sounded, and died away. A pair of warm fingers came to rest on the back of his wrist, very lightly, and did not press.

"He knew," said Luke.

"Yes."

"He knew what it would cost him."

"Yes." His voice was almost inaudible. "I think that he knew at the beginning."

"And he went on."

"He was a very stubborn man."

"He was a good one."

Elias drew a long breath. He turned the page.

They read for an hour. Then, on a page near the end, in a column headed Judicial, they stopped. There were six entries on the page. Each was to the same account. Each was the same sum, to the dollar. Beside the first, in his father's pencil, a note: P. Beside the second, a date. And beside the third, in a hand that was not his father's, a small neat set of initials in blue ink, written very small, in the margin, as a clerk initials a receipt.

F.R.

Elias looked at it.

It was not much. It was two letters, and a full stop. It might have been anything. A bank teller. A secretary. A man who had carried a ledger from a desk to a drawer. But the initials were repeated, in the same blue ink, beside the fifth entry, and the sixth, in the same steady neat hand. And he knew that hand. He had seen it on a hundred memoranda. He had seen it, very recently, on a card of heavy cream, in a flourish. Dr. Mercer: your attendance is requested.

"Luke," he said.

"Yes?"

"Look."

He turned the book.

Luke bent. He read it. It took him perhaps four seconds. He did not speak. He sat with his finger resting beside the little blue letters, and the whole long line of his body went hard, like a bow drawn to the full. Elias felt it through the contact of their knees. It was a stillness so complete that the air around it seemed to chill.

"Rourke," said Luke.

"It is not signed."

"It is his hand."

"Perhaps." Elias kept his voice level. "It is two letters. I am nearly certain. But I am nearly certain of a good many things, and I have been wrong." He drew a slow breath. "It is a witness mark. It means that he was there when the payment was made. It does not mean that he took it. It does not mean that he knew what it was for."

"He was there on three occasions."

"Yes."

"He was the aide of the Deputy Commissioner. Twelve years ago. He carried the file." The voice was quite flat. "And he has stood at my shoulder for ten years, and shaken my hand, and told me that I was the best man in the Department."

"Luke."

"He asked me to dinner. In March. He had a daughter, I think, who was having a baby." The jaw was rigid. "I sat at his table."

"Luke. Look at me."

He did not.

"Condition two," said Elias.

It was very quiet. The words fell into the bright room like a pebble into a pond. Luke's head turned, slowly, and the dark eyes met his own. They were wide and black and quite wild. For a moment Elias did not know what he saw in them, and the fear went through him like cold water.

Then it passed.

He saw the thing that he had hoped for. It rose slowly in the man's face, as a swimmer rises through green water, and broke the surface. A shudder went through him. His eyes closed. He drew breath, once, twice, in long ragged pulls, and when he opened them they were clear.

"No one dies on suspicion," said Luke.

"No."

"We have a page. We have two letters, in blue ink, that may be a clerk's."

"We do."

"It is not enough."

"It is the beginning of enough." Elias laid a hand on the book. "I shall copy it. I shall find the other pages. I shall look at every memorandum that he has signed in twelve years, and compare. I shall not act on it. And neither shall you."

"I will not."

"Say it."

"I will not act on it." The voice cracked. "I give you my word. I will not so much as speak to him differently."

"Thank you."

"It is very hard."

"I know." Elias turned his hand over, on the page, and laid it, palm up, in the other's lap. "I know that it is."

Luke took it.

He held it in both of his. He held it so tightly that the bones shifted, and the knuckles ached. He bent his head over it, and his hair fell forward, and for a long time he did not speak. The sun moved, very slowly, across the cloth. The clock above the door ticked on. Elias sat quite still, with his hand in the man's grasp, and let him hold it.

"I should like to tell you something," said Luke.

It was hardly above a whisper.

"Now."

"If I do not do it now, I do not think that I shall." He did not raise his head. "It is the part that I can say. I will not tell you all of it. I am sorry. There is a piece that I cannot, yet. But I should like you to have the rest."

"You do not have to."

"I know." A faint breath. "That is why."

Elias said nothing.

He sat and waited. He had learned to wait. It was a thing that the dead had taught him, in the cold, in the dark. A man who has been given a long time to speak will speak, in the end, in his own order, and nothing is gained by hurrying him. He kept his hand in the other's, and his eyes on the bent head, and his breath slow.

"I heard a woman's voice," said Luke.

The room was very still.

"At the window. On the second floor. Over the porch." He spoke in the flat, low, patient voice that he had used in the study. "I was standing on the gravel. The whole of the front was alight. I could hear the glass going. And above it, quite clear, in a lull, I heard a woman call out."

"What did she say?"

"I do not know. I could not make out the words." The hands tightened. "It was only a voice. High. It rose at the end. It was calling a name, I think. I have always thought that it was a name. It was the sort of cry that a person makes when she is calling someone in from a garden."

Elias did not breathe.

"I ran in," said Luke. "I do not remember deciding. The door was open. The hall was full of smoke. It was like running into a wall. I got to the stairs, and went up them on my hands and knees, because I could not see." He drew breath. "I do not know how long it took. It was no time at all. It was a year."

"Luke."

"I reached the landing. There was a door. It was the door of the room at the front, where the voice had been. It was hot. I could feel it through my glove. And there was a window in it, a small pane of glass, at the height of my face. I could see light behind it. A great deal of light." A long shaking breath. "I thought that there might be a handle. I thought, if I could only. I put my arm through the glass."

Elias's fingers closed on his.

"It was a very stupid thing to do," said Luke. "I know that now. You do not put your hand into a fire. But I did not think. I put it through, and felt for the lock, and there was heat like a hand on my arm. And I felt, I think, I felt the door begin to give."

"And then?"

"And then the beam came down."

It was a very flat voice. It was the voice of a man reading a report.

"It fell across the landing. I did not see it. I only felt it. It took my arm, from the wrist, and my shoulder, and it pinned me against the door. I could not move. I could hear the fire. I could hear, on the other side, behind the glass, I could hear." He stopped.

He did not go on.

The silence was so long that Elias thought he would not. He sat, with his hand in the grip, and the sun on his face, and the tears running down it. He did not know when they had begun. He did not try to wipe them.

"A fireman got me out," said Luke, at last. His voice was a thread. "A man with a ladder. I do not know his name. He pulled me by the collar down the stair, and across the lawn, and I lay on the grass and watched the roof go in. And someone put a blanket over me. And a woman in a green coat, a neighbor, held a cup of tea to my mouth." A short unsteady breath. "I could not feel my arm. I thought that it was gone. And I thought: I have been in there. I have been in the house. And I did not get to her."

"Luke."

"I was twenty-three years old."

"I know."

"I could not get to her."

"You tried."

"I did not try enough."

"You put your arm through a window."

"It was not enough."

"It was everything that anyone could have done."

"It was not enough." He lifted his head, at last. His face was wet and white, and his eyes were enormous. "She was calling someone. I do not know whom. And I could not, I have never been able to." His voice broke. "I could not bring her out."

Elias did not speak.

There was nothing to say. He had come to the end of words. He drew his hand from the man's grasp, slowly, and he rose, and went round the end of the table. He took the left wrist, gently, in both his own, and turned it over, and laid it palm up on the cloth.

He drew back the sleeve.

It rolled up easily. The cuff of the white shirt was open. He folded it back, twice, to the elbow, and the long pale shining band lay bare in the sun.

It was beautiful.

He had not thought that he would think so. He looked at it with a pathologist's eye, as he had looked at a thousand wounds. It was a wide smooth sweep of scar tissue, silvery and slightly ridged, with a faint pearly lustre in the light. It began at the heel of the hand, and ran up the inner arm to the elbow in a long shallow curve. The edges were soft. The center had the gloss of an old pond. It was a record. It was a thing written on a man in an alphabet that he could read.

He put out his hand.

It was bare. He laid the tips of the fingers on the scar. It was cool, and smooth, and a little dry. It did not feel like skin. It felt like the surface of polished stone, or the inside of a shell. Beneath it, he could feel the faint tick of a pulse.

Nothing happened.

There was no dark. There was no cold. There was only a man's arm, and the warm sun on the cloth, and a pulse. He stroked it. He did it very slowly, from the wrist upward, with the pad of one finger, as one smooths the page of a book to which one has returned after a long time. He followed the line of it to the elbow, and down again.

Luke shut his eyes.

His breath came in short broken pulls. His hand lay quite still on the table, and the fingers curled. A single tear slid from beneath his lashes and ran down his cheek, and fell, and struck the back of Elias's wrist with a tiny warm weight.

"I tried," he said.

"I know."

"I tried to come to them."

"I know. I know that you did." Elias bent. He laid his lips, very lightly, against the inside of the wrist, in the middle of the scar, where the pulse was. He stayed there. "You came."

Neither of them spoke.

When he straightened, he saw it.

It was in the man's face. It was not much. A flicker. It lay behind the wet dark eyes, very deep, as a small stone lies at the bottom of a pond, and it did not move. It was the look of a person who has told a thing that was true, and has stopped, deliberately, a breath before the end of it. He had come to the edge of something. He had looked over. And he had drawn back.

There was a piece that he had not given.

He did not ask.

He looked down into the grave exhausted face, and read the whole of it, and did not ask. It was the second time. It would not be the last. He stood with his hand on the man's head, and the sun on his shoulders, and thought: I am becoming very good at this.

He thought: that is what he is afraid of.

Luke opened his eyes.

He looked up. His gaze was dark and clear and full of an agony so quiet that it did not show. He saw that Elias had seen. He saw that Elias was not going to say so. And something in his face, in that long wordless moment, loosened, and softened, and went very still. It was gratitude. It was terror. It was a love so great that it did not know what to do with itself, and lay in his eyes like a drowned thing in clear water.

"Thank you," he whispered.

"For what?"

"For not asking."

"It is a rule," said Elias. He put out his thumb, and brushed away a tear. "Nobody apologizes before breakfast."

"It is after breakfast."

"Is it?"

"It is nearly noon."

"Then I shall ask you to wait," said Elias. "Until you are ready."

He bent, and kissed him on the forehead. It was a light thing, a brief dry touch, and he straightened at once. He went to the window, and stood with his back to the room, looking down at the white sparkling river and the tiny black bridges, and gave the man a minute to put his face in order.

Behind him, he heard a long breath, and a chair scrape, and a clink of china.

"There is more tea," said Luke.

His voice was almost steady.

"Thank you."

"I shall put the kettle on."

"Yes," said Elias, to the window. "Do."

He stood in the cold bright light and watched a plane cross the sky, very small and silver, towing its thin white thread. And he thought of a woman calling a name from a window, high and clear, in the roar of a fire. He thought of the end of a sentence, a breath too soon. He thought of a count of sixty, and of how, in the end, it was always the part that had not been said that told you how someone died.