A year and a day, Mother Tansy had said, in the dark, with the lid on, and not so much as a minute less.

It had gone by in the end rather quickly, as years do when they are being spent on other things. The anniversary fell on a Monday in the third week of November. Alan, who had marked it in the margin of his notebook in small pencil figures, found that he had also marked in the margin of his heart a kind of dread so quiet and so orderly that it had taken him most of the term to notice it was there. On Tuesday Professor Marlow, who held the key to the ice-store and the Board's regulations in equal reverence, had called the five of them into the greenhouse and fixed the assay for the first Friday after, so that the Healer-Mistress of the infirmary could attend and the witnesses be in their places and no one, he said, be obliged to do the thing in a hurry. It was not a thing to be done in a hurry. He said that to the seedlings, in a low voice, and then said it to them.

By Friday evening Alan had prepared the forms.

There were three. The first was the Board of Assay's Form Two, Record of a Phase One Examination, a long cream sheet of heavy paper printed in the Board's own dry type, which he had found at the back of the appendix to the Charter and copied out in his own hand because the Board charged a crown for a blank. It had boxes for the compound, the quantity, the apparatus, the hour, the effect, and the signatures of four persons: the Assayer, the Independent Observer, the Recorder, and the Applicant. He had ruled a fifth box underneath, in pencil, marked Witnesses, and a sixth marked Deviations from Protocol, which he had left blank on principle.

"It's got a box for everything," said Elen, reading it over his shoulder in the east greenhouse at six o'clock with her arms folded and her chin on his sleeve. She had stopped asking permission for that sort of thing some time in October. "It's got a box for what happens if the ceiling falls in."

"It is called Deviations."

"It's a very good box."

"It is empty," said Alan. "I should like it to remain so."

The greenhouse had been cleared. The long center bench stood bare under a single lamp, scrubbed white, with the apparatus laid out upon it as neatly as surgical instruments. There were two pieces. The first was a hollow glass column about a hand high, stoppered at both ends, in which a single slender reed floated upright in clear spirit. The reed was enchanted. It had been set, Marlow explained, to the standard tremor of the Board's Fourth Grade, which was the shake of an old man's fingers as he tried to thread a needle, and it shivered ceaselessly in its tube, very faintly and very fast, like a leaf in a draft that was not there. The second was a small bell jar of dark glass with a single drop of blue dye in the bottom. The dye clouded if anything placed beside it was harmful. It was, Marlow said, a very honest apparatus. It had been in the Academy's cupboard for ninety years and had never once been known to flatter anybody.

They were seven. Marlow, in a clean waistcoat, for once buttoned correctly, which Alan found more alarming than anything else that evening. Mira and Dara, side by side at the end of the bench with their hands folded, in the posture of two people who have been told they are witnesses and mean to take it seriously. Elen, with a paper card sticking out of her coat pocket and her hair tied up in an entirely sensible knot. Alan, with the ledger and the pen from his grandfather. And, seated bolt upright on a stool by the door with her arms crossed over a vast gray shawl and the expression of a woman who had been brought to look at a thing and intended to see it, Healer-Mistress Brandt of the infirmary.

She was stout and square and silent, with iron hair cropped like a boy's and hands like two loaves. She had been introduced as the Independent Observer. She had nodded. Since then she had said exactly four words, which were, "Show me the key," and Marlow had shown it, and she had looked at it, and grunted, and that had been all.

They went down to the ice-store together, by way of the kitchens, in a procession.

Alan walked at the end. He was very aware of the night cook's bowl on the long table as they passed, under its cloth, with its small note propped against it, and he was aware, as the cook herself had apparently become aware over the last year, that for some time now there had been more than one ghost. The note, he saw, said Four of you now. Honey's in the pot. He kept his eyes front.

The jar lay where it had slept, in the stone niche at the back of the ice-house, under its black cloth, in a cold so sharp that their breath stood in the air like smoke. Marlow drew the key from his waistcoat. He unlocked the small iron box that held it. He took the jar out in both hands, and turned, and held it for a moment in the lamplight, and drew back the cloth.

It was silver.

It was not the pale shine of a year ago. A year in the dark had deepened it. The brine had cleared to a perfect stillness, and the petals, which had been small and white and frail, had turned in their long winter to something he had no word for: slender translucent veils, hung in the clear spirit like moonlight set in glass. It gave off a light of its own. It was steady and cold and very quiet. It lit the underside of the old man's chin and the lines in his face, and Elen, who had made a small sound under her breath, put one hand over her mouth.

Her other hand was shaking.

Alan saw it. He put down the ledger on the lid of a barrel, and went to her side, and without a word laid the pen across her open palm. She looked at it. It was a heavy silver pen with a gold nib, much worn, and it was warm from his pocket.

"Hold it," he said. "It is a thing to do with your hand."

She closed her fingers on it. The shaking slowed, and stopped.

"Thank you," said Elen, in a whisper.

When they were back in the greenhouse, Alan began to record.

He did it as he did everything that mattered, with a kind of calm absorbed severity, in his small upright hand. Compound: infusion of silverbell petals, nine nights in frostroot brine, one year and one day in darkness, under seal. Quantity: one drop, as measured by glass rod. Apparatus: Reed, Grade Four. Gauge: clear. Hour: seven minutes past seven by the west clock, which he checked against his own watch, and found a minute out, and noted. He checked it twice. It was only when Elen leaned across the bench and said, in a tone of deep and wondering affection, "You're enjoying this," that he realized he had been humming.

"I am," said Alan, stiffly. "I am ashamed."

"Don't be. It's a very good enjoyment."

"It is only that it is a form."

"It's a form with a box for the ceiling," said Elen, "and I've never seen anyone so happy."

He did not answer. Mira, beside him, was shaking, very faintly, and had her pencil pressed to her mouth.

Elen took up the glass rod. It was a plain thin rod, clear as water, with a small blunt bead on the tip. She dipped it into the jar, in silence, with the other six watching, and drew it out, and a single drop hung from the bead, silver and slow and trembling, like a drop of the moon. She held it for a moment above the tube. Her hand was quite steady now. She lowered it. She touched the bead to the surface of the spirit, beside the shivering reed, and the drop slid off and went down through the clear liquid in a long bright thread, and was gone.

Nothing happened.

The reed shook on. It was very quiet in the greenhouse. A single drop of water from the roof fell on the bench with a small hard tick. Alan said, "Seven minutes past seven. Dose administered," in a low even voice, and wrote it down, and his pen scratched over the paper like a mouse in a wall.

"A minute," said Elen, softly.

"A minute," said Alan.

They waited. The Healer-Mistress, on her stool by the door, had not moved, and her broad gray face was a closed door. Marlow had his hands clasped behind his back. Dara had stopped breathing. The reed in its glass column shivered and shivered, fast and fine and unbroken, and the light of the single lamp lay along the bench, and two minutes went by, and then, with a dreadful slowness, three.

Elen's face was beginning to fall. He saw it happen. It was a small thing, a loosening round the mouth, a dimming in the eyes, such as he had seen once before, at the foot of a library stair, when she had said it slides off. She stood with the glass rod still in her hand, and her whole bright eager body began to fold in on itself like a flower at dusk.

"It's not," she said. "It hasn't. Oh. It's gone off. I knew it, I knew I'd, it's the brine, it's the light, I looked, I looked at it once."

"Three minutes ten," said Alan.

She stopped.

"The reed," said Alan. "Look at the reed."

It had hesitated.

It was only for a heartbeat. A small slackening in the fine rapid shiver, a missed beat, as a heart misses one when it is startled, and then the tremor took up again, but not as it had been. It was slower. It was just perceptibly slower. A little hush had come over the thing, like the first hush that falls on a room when someone has said a name.

"Oh," said Elen.

It went on. At three minutes forty it had lost a quarter of its speed. At five minutes it was shaking at half its first violence, with long gentle pauses between, like a clock running down. Alan wrote, in a steady hand, with the numerals perfectly aligned. He did not look up. He did not dare look up, because if he looked at her face he would stop writing, and the record must not stop. Five minutes ten. Reed at half tremor. Gauge clear. At six minutes there was a sound at the end of the bench that was half a gasp and half a sob, and he kept writing. At seven minutes the reed was a slow unhurried sway, as of a stalk in a barely felt wind. At eight minutes and twenty seconds, quite suddenly and without any ceremony whatever, in the cold light of the lamp, it stood still.

It stood straight up in its tube like a pen in a rack. It did not shiver. It did not waver. It stood in the clear spirit as still and silent and perfectly upright as a line drawn with a ruler, and nothing in the world had ever been so steady.

Nobody said anything.

At the end of the bench, Dara had begun to cry quietly, with his thin hands pressed over his face. Mira, beside him, had put her arm round his shoulders without looking, and she was crying too, a little, with her chin up. Marlow was standing perfectly still, with his hands behind his back, and a single tear had run down his long jaw and fallen onto the front of his clean waistcoat, and he did not appear to have noticed. And on the stool by the door, in the great gray shawl, the Healer-Mistress had got to her feet.

She crossed the floor in four strides. She bent over the bell jar and looked at it for a long time. The blue drop at the bottom lay clear as a sapphire, undimmed. She straightened. She looked at the reed. She looked at Elen, with her pale shrewd eyes under their shelf of brow, and said, in the voice of a woman who has not wasted words in forty years and does not intend to begin:

"Clean."

It was the fifth word.

Elen was crying. She was doing it without any sound at all, standing straight and still at the end of the bench with the glass rod in her hand and the tears running down her face in two bright lines, and she did not wipe them. She was looking at the reed. She was looking at it as one looks at a thing one has carried a very long way and has suddenly, without warning, been told one may set down.

"Eight minutes twenty seconds," said Alan. "Reed at rest. Gauge clear. Observer's finding: clean." His voice shook on the last word. He wrote it down. He wrote it very slowly, with the pen pressing, so that the letters stood up black and exact on the cream paper, and then he put the pen down and found that he could not at once pick it up.

They watched the reed for forty-one minutes.

There was nothing to do but watch. No one left. No one sat. Marlow stood with his hands behind his back and looked at the glass, and Brandt stood with her arms folded and looked at the glass, and the two witnesses held hands and looked at the glass, and Alan, with the ledger open and the watch in his left palm, called the time aloud every minute in an even undertone, as a man calls the depth of a channel. Elen said nothing at all. She stood with her fingers wrapped around the edge of the bench and her eyes fixed on a slender reed that did not move, and her lips were pressed together so tightly that they had gone pale.

At thirty-eight minutes, the reed twitched.

It was the faintest thing. A quiver at the tip, no more than a hair's breadth. Alan saw it, and his heart dropped, and he went on calling the time. At forty, it was shivering again, very softly, in a long slow wavering line. At forty-one minutes and a few seconds, as though it had never stopped, it had taken up the whole of its old fast fine tremble, and stood in the spirit shaking exactly as it had shaken at seven minutes past seven.

"Forty-one minutes," said Elen.

Her voice was very small. Her shoulders had come down. She stood looking at the shivering reed, with the card half pulled out of her pocket and the glass rod forgotten in her fist, and the light went out of her face a little at a time.

"It wears off. It only, it's only forty-one minutes. That's nothing. That isn't a cure, that's. You couldn't live on it. It's a, oh, I thought, I thought if it worked it would."

"Forty-one minutes," said Alan.

He had not meant to speak. He found that he had come round the end of the bench, and was standing in front of her, not touching her, with his ledger shut under his arm and his face, he suspected, doing something that no one had ever seen it do.

"A hand," he said, "that cannot thread a needle. That has not been able to thread a needle for two years. For forty-one minutes, in the middle of a Friday evening, was as still as a stone." He drew a breath. "Mr. Oswin could sew a button on a coat. He could thread forty needles. He could do his own cuffs. He could hold a cup of tea without it chattering on the saucer, and drink it. For forty-one minutes." His voice cracked. He let it. "That is not nothing. I do not know what it is. But it is not nothing."

She stared at him.

"A first result," said Professor Marlow, from the end of the bench, in a rough low voice, "is not a cure. It is the beginning of an argument with nature. And it is the right kind of argument, for it was begun in the open, on a form, before an observer, in a clean room." He took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. "I have waited thirty years to see one begun in the right way. I shall have the Board in tears."

"Clean," said Healer-Mistress Brandt, again, to the room. And then, after a visible struggle, she added a sixth word, which was "Good," and sat down on her stool and folded her arms.

Elen made a sound.

It was a thin wet cracked sound, with a laugh and a sob in it twisted together, and it came out of her all at once, and then she was no longer standing in front of him but against him. She had thrown both her arms round his neck. She had done it so fast that he had not seen it coming, and the whole of her weight came against his chest, small and warm and shaking, and her face was pressed into the angle of his collar and her hair, smelling of mint and woodsmoke and the cold of the ice-house, was against his jaw.

He stood quite still for one second.

Then his arms came up. He did not decide it. They closed round her, one across her shoulders and one at the small of her back, and held her, hard, and he put his chin down against the top of her head, where the knot had come loose, and shut his eyes.

She was crying into his collar. She was saying something. It was muffled, and went on for a while, and he caught pieces of it: "forty-one" and "your pen" and "I couldn't have" and "you wrote it all down." He did not answer. He held her. It was the longest she had ever been in his arms, and she did not let go, and neither did he, and in the great silent glass-roofed room, with the cold light of the lamp and the quiet drip of the roof, there was no one at all.

There was, in fact, a cough.

It was Mira. It was a loud, brisk, entirely artificial cough, followed immediately by a very pointed rustle of papers, and a remark, delivered in an iron voice to the ceiling, to the effect that she thought they ought to measure the spirit level, as it had been some time. Dara, who was scarlet to the ears, said "Yes" and began very conscientiously to examine the apparatus. Marlow turned, with great dignity, to look at a tray of seedlings, and addressed it. Healer-Mistress Brandt, on her stool, did not move her face in the slightest, but one of her eyebrows went up by about a quarter of an inch.

Elen drew back. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, and looked up at him, laughing, damp-eyed and flushed and shining, and he saw that she was not embarrassed at all.

"I got your collar wet," she said.

"It will dry."

"I'm not sorry."

"I did not suppose that you were."

"Alan." She was holding his sleeves. Her voice was low, for him alone. "Thank you for the form."

"It was a box," said Alan. "I only drew the boxes."

"You drew the boxes," said Elen, and her eyes shone, "and I held the pen."

He signed. They all signed: the Assayer, the Observer, the Recorder, the Applicant, and, beneath, in a small gray hand, the two witnesses. He looked at the sixth box. It was empty. He felt a small clear satisfaction, as though at a locked door, and blotted the page.

Elen took out her card. She looked at it, under the lamp. It said, in her quick uphill hand, Seed. Water. Fruit. She took a pencil from behind her ear, and, with a long, grave, shaking breath, wrote on the bottom of it, very small:

Fruit: 41 minutes.

Then she put the card back in her pocket, over her heart, and buttoned her coat.

The market, on Saturday morning, was white with frost, and it took the five of them, six counting Marlow, who had been sent for a stick and had refused, nearly an hour to get down the Lantern Stair.

This was largely because Elen had to stop. She stopped for the felted-slipper woman, who wept, and for a boy with a barrow of turnips, who was told, without preamble, in the middle of a flight of icy steps, that it had worked, and who said, "What's worked?" and was told it had not worked, not yet, but it was a start. She stopped for Mr. Pike, who sold knives, and was embraced, to his visible alarm. By the time they reached the bottom, with the lanterns still lit in the early dark of the hollow and the fiddler beginning on his first tune, she was entirely out of breath, and Alan, who had been walking one step behind her with a leather folder under his arm and a thermos of cider in his coat pocket, was the only one of the party who still had a clear head.

He had the petition.

It was a sheet of fine stiff paper, folded in three, and he had drawn it up himself in the hours between the assay and midnight, in small clear letters, from the text of Section 14(c). It had a heading, and a body, and ten numbered lines for names, with room beside each for a mark. And beneath the heading, in a separate paragraph, he had set out a statement that each signatory must hear before signing, which he now stood on a barrel in front of the Voices' fountain and read aloud, in a clear level voice that carried across the lane.

"This is an experimental infusion," said Alan. "It has been tried once, on an apparatus, in the presence of an observer. It has not been tried upon any person. It is not for use. It may not work. It may do harm. Nothing is asked of you now but your name, so that the Board may see that there are people who would wish it to be examined. You are under no obligation. You may refuse. You may sign and change your mind. I shall remove your name at your request, at any time, without question."

He stopped. In front of him, a ring of old faces under knitted hats and shawls looked up at him in the lantern-light. Nobody spoke. And then somebody at the back, in a voice like dry paper, said, "Valemont. Never once haggled."

"Sir," said Alan.

"Read it again, boy. My ears aren't what they were."

He read it again.

The first to sign was Mr. Oswin.

He came forward on the arm of the tinker, slow and bent, with his round spectacles flashing in the lantern-light and a bundle of buttons in his two shaking hands, and stood in front of the folder, and looked at the pen. Alan held it out. He took it, in his right hand, and then, as it trembled so, in both. He bent over the paper. He wrote slowly, a single wavering letter at a time: O. S. W. Halfway through the second the ink blotted. A large black star spread over the line, and he straightened, and looked at it, and his whole old face crumpled.

"I'll write it again," said Alan, quickly. "It is no difficulty. I have a fresh sheet."

"No," said Mr. Oswin.

He said it quite quietly. He looked at the blot. His shaking hand lay on the paper beside it. "No. Leave the blot, lad." He gave a small dry laugh. "It's what the medicine's for. I'd like the Board to see it."

Alan took the pen from his fingers, and wrote the rest of the name himself, beneath the star, in a clear upright hand, with the numeral one in the margin. He did not trust his voice.

They came one at a time. Mrs. Aldous came, with her stick, and her husband at her elbow with his own stick laid aside, and she signed with her left hand, which was the weak one, with an agonizing slowness, the tip of her tongue between her teeth, and when it was done she lifted her chin and said, in a clear fierce old voice, "There," like a woman who has crossed a river. Mr. Aldous signed after her. The tinker signed. The felted-slipper woman signed, crying, with a baby on her hip. Mr. Pike signed, and added, unasked, "And my brother," and was told that the brother would require a separate sheet. A very old woman Alan had never seen, with a face like a winter apple, made her mark, a firm square cross, and then, because it was not enough, drew a small round cat beside it.

"Now," said Granny Hobb.

She had been standing at the back with her stick and her mug and her blanket, watching all of it with her black currant eyes, saying nothing, which for her was a form of fever. She came forward. She did not take the pen. She looked at the paper for a long time, and then at Elen, who was standing a little behind Alan with her hands pressed together.

"I am eighty-one years old," said Granny Hobb.

"Yes, ma'am," said Elen.

"I have done my own cider every morning since I was nine. I have a ladle that was my mother's." She held out her mug. It was full to the brim, and the liquid in it was moving. It was not moving much. It was a faint, fine, constant ripple, like the surface of a pond under a very light rain. "I've had that," said Granny Hobb, "for three winters. It's worse than his. It's a good deal worse than Oswin's. I hide it in my lap. I've never told the girl."

Elen made a small broken noise.

"Don't you start," said the old woman. "I'll sign. Give me the pen."

She signed. It was not a good signature. It took her a long time, and when it was done the letters leaned across the line like a row of drunken sailors, and she looked at them, and sniffed, and handed the pen back. Then she turned, with great deliberateness, and put her mug into Elen's hands.

"Hold that," said Granny Hobb. "Don't spill it."

The last was Mother Tansy.

She came last, at her own pace, wrapped in her moss-colored shawl with her cold pipe clenched between her gums, and took the pen from Alan with two fingers. She signed her name, which was Tansy and nothing else, in a hand like a hedge in winter, and then she handed him back the pen and said, "Now I'll sign again."

"Madam," said Alan, "a petition may be signed once."

"I know the law, boy. I want it down that I saw the girl brew it." The pale gray eyes slid to Elen. "I did not see it. But I taught her the nine nights and I'd sign twice if I could. Put it in the margin. 'Witness: I, Tansy.'"

"I shall add it," said Alan, gravely, "as a note."

He did. He wrote it in the margin in small clear letters, beside the tenth line, and the old woman read it over his arm, and gave a short harsh cackle, and said, "Hah."

They were all done by the time the lamps were lit.

Ten names, in ten hands, on a single sheet of paper, with a blot in the first line and a note in the margin and a small round cat. Alan stood under the nearest lantern and read it from end to end, and then folded it in three, and put it into the leather folder, and closed the flap, and for a moment could not do anything else at all.

"Mr. Valemont," said a voice.

Granny Hobb had reclaimed her mug from Elen, who was blowing her nose into Mira's handkerchief at a little distance, and was looking at him over the rim with an expression of deep and wicked satisfaction.

"Ma'am."

"I said, a year ago, from this stool, that you had made a very great mistake."

"I recall it."

"You looked in at me out of a carriage. I thought, there goes a boy who's about to find out how long a summer is." She drank. "Did you finish it?"

"Ma'am?"

"That sentence." The black eyes did not blink. "The one the girl wouldn't tell me about. The one that was going to be said on the terrace and wasn't. I've heard a great many stories, but I'd like to hear the end of that one before I'm dead."

He felt the heat go from his collar to his hair. "Not yet," said Alan.

"Hm." She looked at him a moment longer. Then she looked across the lane, at the girl in the patched brown coat with a kerchief to her face and a head of red hair coming loose from its knot, and her wrinkled mouth went soft. "Well. The wall's been repaired."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said the wall's been repaired." She sniffed. "In a lopsided sort of fashion. A few stones in the wrong place. It'll do." She raised her mug an inch. "Go on. She's waiting."

The Lantern Stair, in the dusk, with the whole market falling away below them in a sea of gold, was exactly as long as it had always been, three hundred steps of frost and iron, and Alan climbed it with a leather folder under his arm and his heart making a noise like a drum.

Elen was beside him. She had said nothing since the fountain. She climbed with her head down and her hands in her pockets and a small odd smile that appeared and vanished at the corner of her mouth, as though she were hearing a tune very far away.

On the hundredth step, without looking at him, she took her left hand out of her pocket, and put it into his.

She did it quite simply. It was not a thing she asked. There were people on the stair above them, and people below, a girl with a basket, a pair of first-years, a tall prefect from the Dueling Society who looked down at their joined hands and very carefully looked away. Alan felt it. He felt the whole width of it, the warm small ink-stained palm, the fingers lacing, the soft insistent pressure that said, here. He thought, with a clear and distant astonishment: it is the public staircase.

He did not take his hand away.

He closed his fingers round hers. He walked on. Behind them, a long way down, the fiddler struck up a new tune, and the lanterns of the Voices swung gently on their strings, and somebody laughed. And three hundred steps went by in the cold blue dusk under the first of the stars, and neither of them said anything at all.

Professor Marlow signed the sponsor's line at half past five, in the east greenhouse, at the long center bench, with a pen he had to borrow because his own was in the other waistcoat.

He did it with great care. He read the whole of the petition first, standing up, with his spectacles pushed to the top of his head, and when he reached the blot in the first line he stopped for a long moment. Then he read the margin. Then he signed his name beneath it, Ambrose Marlow, Assayer, Third Class, in a clear and slightly shaking hand, and put down the pen.

"That is the sponsor," he said. "The ten. The Phase One Record. The formula. It will go in on the first of March, under Section 14(c), with the remission. It will be examined by the Board in the spring of the year after next." He looked at them. "I regret the delay. It is the speed of the thing."

"Two springs," said Elen. "That's a long wait."

"It is a good deal shorter than three."

He was silent a moment. His long jaw moved. Then he turned, and went to the shelf by the stove where the Board's regulations were kept in a battered green binding, and took the volume down, and opened it, with his thumb, at a page that had been marked, and stood looking at it.

"Mr. Valemont," he said. "You have read Section Nine of the Assay Regulations."

"I have."

"Then you will know what it says on the matter of reporting."

Alan had known for two days. He had known since the moment he drew up the form, and had put it from his mind, as a man puts from his mind a letter he has not yet opened. He said, in a level voice, "Any Phase One result obtained within an educational body shall be reported, in full, to the Standards Committee of the Council, within thirty days of the date of the assay."

"In full."

"In full."

"To the Chair."

"To the Committee," said Alan, "over the signature of its Chair."

Nobody said anything. The stove ticked. Outside, a single flake of snow drifted across the glass. Mira had gone quite still, with her hand on the back of Dara's chair, and Elen, who had been smiling at the blot in the petition, looked up slowly.

"He'll read it," she said.

"He will read all of it," said Marlow. "The compound. The method. The place it has been kept for a year. The names of every person in this room. The date, the hour, and the number of the key." He closed the book. "I have been thinking of that, I find, since the moment the reed stood still."

"Procedure requires it," said Alan.

He heard how it sounded. He had said it a hundred times in his life, with the whole of his heart, and it had never once weighed what it weighed now. It lay in the warm air of the greenhouse like a stone in a pocket.

"Procedure requires it," said Marlow. "That is the thing about a trap, Mr. Valemont. It is very rarely made of anything but the rules."

He stood a while with his hand on the closed volume. Then he raised his head, and in the low lamplight his face was neither vague nor kind but old and clear and decided.

"We shall report it," he said. "On the thirtieth day. Not on the twenty-ninth. Not on the first. On the last day the law allows, in the fullest and plainest account that Mr. Valemont can draw, with nothing left out and nothing put in." He looked at Alan. "The truth, in full. It is the one thing he cannot say we have hidden. And it is the one thing," said the old man, quietly, "that I have never yet seen him know what to do with."

Alan took up his pen.

He sat down at the bench, in the lamplight, with the ledger open at the page that said Reed at rest, and began, in his small clear upright hand, at the top of a fresh sheet, to write.

In the margin of his own mind, with perfect clarity, as one reads a line in a language one has known all one's life, he heard a voice say, I'd always rather be frightened with you than safe without.

He wrote the date. He did not hurry.