Elen Joy missed two lessons that week, and for the first time in fourteen months Alan could not tell himself that it was frivolity.

He noticed it on Monday. The sixth desk of the sixth row stood empty at the back of the Foundations hall beside the snoring Ormsby, with its brass plate gleaming and a small damp ring on the wood where a teacup had once stood. The professor of Foundations ticked it in his register without looking up, and said nothing at all, which Alan had learned to read as a sign of concern. On Tuesday it stood empty again.

He did not look for her. He wished that to be understood, by himself at least. He had spent a Sunday revising the thirty-day report on the Phase One assay, which was due to the Standards Committee on the twenty-fourth and which he intended to deliver, as Marlow had instructed, in the fullest and plainest form that the English language allowed. He had spent Monday afternoon on Warding Geometry. He had spent Monday evening, for no reason that he could have defended in a court, in the Great Hall, reading the same page of the same book and listening for a laugh.

"She's not in the greenhouse," said Pip, across the supper table on Tuesday, with the exaggerated carelessness of a man who has made inquiries. "Mira says she told her she'd be elsewhere. Wren says she's running. Theo says she's got a cold."

"Theo is mistaken."

"Theo is always mistaken, it's his best quality." Pip pushed a pea round his plate. "She's not in the library. She's not in the market. I asked Granny Hobb's grandson, who knows everything, and he says nobody's seen her since Saturday."

"Saturday was the Frost Fair."

"Saturday," said Pip, with infinite gentleness, "was the day you laughed. And then a notice went up." He did not look at Alan's pocket. He did not need to. "I'm only saying. I'm neutral. But I would say it was the kind of day that gives a person a lot to think about, in a lot of directions."

Alan said nothing. In the breast pocket of his coat, folded in three, lay a cream-colored notice with a red seal, and beside it, a small creased strip of paper with a row of tally marks and a star. He had not parted with either since Saturday. He did not entirely know which was the heavier.

The card was in his pigeonhole when he went to look for the post.

He knew it at once. It lay in the dark of the wooden slot like a pale leaf: a strip of the Annex's rough gray paper, no longer than his hand, folded once. It had been written in a quick uphill scrawl, with a brush, and the ink had not quite dried.

PROMISES, said the top, in capitals. Back by five on Wednesday. (Water.)

Beneath it, smaller:

The west tower. Behind the clock-keeper's door. The loose stair, third from the bottom. It's where I go. I've never asked anyone. Come if you want. You don't have to. Bring nothing, not even the lamp. There's one there.

And under that, in the smallest hand of all, so small that he had to hold it to the light:

I'm not in trouble. I'm just running. It's different. E.

He read it four times. He did not decide anything. He put it into the pocket with the other two, and found that his hand was not quite steady.

The clock-keeper's door stood at the end of a long stone passage behind the west stair, past the lumber room and the boiler, in a part of the Academy that Alan had never needed to visit and had, until that afternoon, considered to be mainly theoretical. It was a low arched door of black oak, with a brass plate that said CLOCK-KEEPER: KNOCK, and beneath it, in smaller and more resigned letters, LOUDLY. He knocked. He knocked loudly. Nothing answered but a distant steady tock, tock, tock, as of a very large heart beating in a very large dark room.

He tried the latch. It lifted.

Inside was a small stone chamber with a stove, a cot, a table with a half-eaten plate of cheese and a very old man asleep on the cot with a gray cat on his chest and a tin whistle on his stomach. The old man was snoring in time to the clock. In the far wall, half hidden behind a rack of oilcans and a curtain of dangling keys, was a narrow wooden stair that went up into the dark.

Alan looked at the sleeping clock-keeper. He thought, with a clear and rueful distinctness, of a printed form, a signature, an interview with a prefect. There was no form. There was no box for this. He had never in his life gone into a place without leave, except twice, in a larder and a forest, both times in a girl's company and both times, he now understood, because he had wished to.

He filed a form in his head, and went up.

The third step was loose. It sagged and creaked under his boot, and he stepped over it on the way down in his mind and on the way up in fact, and kept on climbing, round and round, past little slit windows that let in blades of gray light and the sound of rooks. The ticking grew louder. It filled the stair. It was no longer a sound but a pressure, a slow regular throb in the stone, in his ribs, in the soles of his feet. And then the stair ended in a trapdoor, and he put up a hand, and pushed, and the world opened out above him like the inside of a great brass flower.

It was the clock.

He had known that it was there. He had not known that it was this. The whole upper chamber of the west tower had been given over to the machine that told the school its hours, and it was enormous. Great wheels of dull gold turned slowly in the half-light, each as tall as a man, their teeth meshing with the deliberate patience of a mill. Iron rods ran up through the dark. Chains hung in loops. In the center, beyond a railing, a pendulum as long as a ship's mast swung from the invisible roof beams in a slow gleaming arc, and every time it reached the end of its swing, it paused for the smallest fraction of a breath, and the whole room paused with it, and then it came back. Tock. Tock. Overhead, beyond the topmost wheel, in the dark of the beams, hung something huge and black and silent that he knew at once, though he had seen it only once, from below, in a blaze of gold. It was the great bell. It hung motionless in the roof like a sleeping animal.

The light came in through four tall slit windows. It lay in long thin pale bars across the dusty floor. And in the pool of the nearest, with her boots off and her feet tucked under her and a patched quilt round her shoulders, sat Elen.

She had made a nest. He saw that at once. In the angle between two great wheels she had set an ancient armchair of cracked leather, with the stuffing coming out of one arm, and a table made of an upturned crate, and a spirit stove with a battered kettle. There was a shelf of jars along a beam. There were leaves pressed flat and pinned in rows along the rafters, hundreds of them, like a ceiling of small brown flags. A coat hung from a nail. A blanket lay folded on a pallet. And on the nearest cogwheel, perched at an angle of deep sardonic disapproval, a small pewter frog stared out over the whole arrangement with an expression that said he had seen worse.

"Four minutes and seventeen seconds," said Elen.

"I beg your pardon?"

"From the clock-keeper's door. I was counting. I thought, if he comes, he'll take ten minutes, because he'll be thinking about the form." She was smiling at the lid of the kettle. It was not quite her usual smile. It was small and shy and a little tired. "You were quick."

"I did not file one," said Alan.

"No."

"I should like it known that I did not file one."

"It's known." She looked up. Her eyes were very bright and very steady, with faint shadows under them. "Thank you for coming."

He did not know where to put himself. He stood at the head of the trapdoor with his hands at his sides and the great pendulum swinging at his back, and she looked at him with her chin on her knees and said nothing. Then she lifted one end of the quilt, and shifted along the arm of the chair, and patted the cracked leather beside her.

He sat. It was a very deep chair. It tipped him, rather, toward the middle, so that their shoulders were touching before he had time to arrange them, and he did not rearrange them. She poured tea from the kettle into a chipped blue mug and handed it to him. It was hot and very sweet, with a taste of mint.

For a little while they sat and listened to the clock.

"It's the only place," said Elen at last, "where nobody corrects me."

She said it to the pendulum. He did not say anything. The great arc swung out through the pale bars of light and hung and came back.

"I found it in my first term. Not the day I arrived, the week after. I'd been in the Warden's office twice and Marlow's greenhouse once and I'd been told, very nicely, by three different people, that I'd do very well if I'd only settle. And I came down the passage looking for somewhere to be sick, and the door was open, and there was a man asleep with a cat. I came up here. It was so loud." She tilted her head. "It's the loudest place in the school. But it's not loud at me. It's just loud. It doesn't want me to be anything. It's just counting."

"Who corrected you?" said Alan.

He had not meant to ask. It came out low and level, and it was not a question about the Warden. She heard that. He saw her hear it. The cup stopped halfway to her mouth.

"You've worked that out," she said.

"I have worked out nothing. I have observed that you say it as though you were reciting a catechism." He turned the blue mug in his hands. "I do not wish to press. I wish only to say that I shall listen. I have a good deal of practice in not speaking. I am told that it is useful."

She was silent a long time.

Then she set her cup down on the arm of the chair, and drew the quilt closer round her, and, with her eyes on the swinging pendulum, began.

"I was twelve. Dad was lecturing in the city, at the Geographical College, for a whole term. It was the first time we'd stopped anywhere longer than a month. Mum said it would be good for me and Ethan to be somewhere with proper desks, so they sent us to a day school. Mine was called St. Anselm's. It was a nice school. It had a garden. It had a lovely headmistress with a lavender cardigan." Her voice was quite flat. "I liked it for about three weeks."

He did not move.

"I talked too much," said Elen. "I know that. I did. I asked questions in the middle of other people's questions. I went out at break to talk to the beech tree and came back late. I took the lesson on the life cycle of the frog and asked whether, if you were a frog, you'd know. They didn't think that was a question. They thought it was a, a disruption." She almost laughed. "My teacher was called Miss Pargeter. She was so kind. She had a very soft voice. She used to put her hand on my shoulder when she spoke to me and it always felt like being tucked into a drawer."

The pendulum swung out and hung.

"She called me up after class one day, when I was thirteen weeks into the term. She sat me down at her desk and said, 'Elen, dear.' And then she said, very gently, 'You'd be such a lovely girl if you were only a little less.'" She said it in a high, sweet, hushed voice, a perfect mimic, and it sent a chill down his spine. "That was the whole thing. 'A little less.' She didn't say less what. She didn't have to. It was everything."

"Elen," said Alan.

"No, let me. I've never said it in order." Her hands were folded in her lap, quite still. "After that, it was on my report. Remedial: Conduct. They moved me to the front, next to the stove. They gave me lines. 'I will be quiet in class.' A hundred times. And the thing is, they weren't unkind. Not one of them. They were all so careful with me. They were all so sorry about it. Miss Pargeter cried, a bit, when she gave me the lines. She said it was for my own good, and I could see that she meant it. She loved me. That was the awful part. She really did, in her way, and her way was a pair of shears."

He was holding the mug so tightly that the glaze creaked.

"I got very good at it," said Elen. "That spring. I learned to say sorry before I'd done anything. I said it forty times a day. I said it to the door when I bumped it. I said it to the beech tree. I said it, once, to a puddle I'd stepped in, and Ethan heard me and went completely white." Her mouth shook, and steadied. "Dad found out in April. He came to collect us from the school, and he looked at my report, and he looked at me, and he didn't say anything at all. He took the report and put it in his coat pocket, and he took my hand, and we walked out. We were on a cart by evening. Mum cried the whole way to the coast. And I thought it was all over. I thought, we've left, and it's done. I'd been so sure that if we went, I'd stop."

"And did you?"

"Stop saying sorry?" She turned her head against the leather, at last, and looked at him. "I'm still doing it. Not out loud. It's just under. It's like a tune I can't stop humming. Every time somebody's nice to me, I wait for the little bit that comes after." She drew a long breath. "And then at the Academy, at my entrance interview, there was a very kind old man at a very long table with a ledger, and he asked me about my conduct, and I told the truth, I said I did sometimes run off. And he smiled at me over his spectacles, and he said, 'My dear, I'm sure you will do splendidly, if you can learn to be a little less.'"

She said it in a different voice, a dry thin warm one, and there was a silence in the clockwork like the silence at the top of a swing.

"The same sentence," said Alan.

"The same sentence. Word for word. From a stranger, in a different city, six years later." Her voice cracked on it. "That's when I understood it wasn't anybody's fault. It's just what people do. They look at somebody like me and they want to make me fit. And they do it so nicely. They do it because they like me. They want me to be happy, and they think the way to do it is to take off the sharp bits."

"And you ran," said Alan, softly.

"I ran. I run up here, and into the forest, and the market, and the library, and I go very fast so that nobody has time to say it." She laughed, wet, and put the back of her wrist to her eyes. "I'm not a bad person, Alan. I know that. I'm not a rule-breaker for the sake of it. I'm just someone who can't stand still while they're trimming."

He had been told in his youth that there was a correct response to distress, and that it consisted of a handkerchief and a short sentence. He had a handkerchief. He did not use it. He sat very still in the cracked leather chair, with the mug in his hands and her shoulder against his, and listened to the great slow tock of the pendulum, and did nothing, and said nothing, and let her finish.

"That's why I stopped," said Elen, after a while, in a smaller voice. "This week. That's why I went."

"Went?"

"Away. Up here." She did not look at him. "It was your father's letter."

He did not breathe.

"I read it," she said. "On the Spindle. By the lantern. 'The company you keep this year is such as will bear examination.' I held it in my hand and I thought, well. That's me. That's the company. I'm the three notes on a file and the ivy and the mustard stains. I'm what your father means." She said it gently, without any heat. "And then there was the notice. 'A. Valemont, nominated by the House.' With the Chair in the room. And I stood there on Saturday night with my head on your shoulder, and I was so happy, and I thought, I could do it."

"Do what?"

"Be correct," said Elen.

The word hung in the dim air like a plucked string.

"I could do it for a year and a half. Easily. I could sit in the third row with my hands folded and come to every lesson on time. I could not climb in by windows. I could be quiet in the corridor. I could put my hair in a proper plait and say, 'Yes, Warden,' and keep it up till graduation. I'd be so good. I was good, for a whole term, once. I know exactly how." She was still not looking at him. She was looking at her hands. "And then there'd be no mark in any book, and no company that couldn't bear examination, and you'd have your cadetship. And I'd have done it for you. Because I love you."

The pendulum swung out, and hung, and did not come back.

It did. It was only the length of a breath. But for that single instant, Alan would swear afterward, the whole tower stood still, every wheel and chain and rod, with the dust turning in the pale bars of light and a girl sitting in a battered chair with her mouth open, having heard what she had just said.

"As a friend," said Elen, very fast. "I mean. Obviously. I mean, I'd do it as a. I didn't mean." She went scarlet, from her collar to her hair. "I meant love as in the, the general sense. You know. The way you'd, oh, Alan, don't look at me like that, I didn't plan it, it came out."

"I am not looking at you in any manner," said Alan. His voice was not steady. "I am looking at the pendulum."

"You're looking at me like the pendulum."

"It is a very reliable instrument."

She made a small helpless sound and put her forehead down on her knees. He saw the back of her neck go pink. After a moment, very quietly, with her face hidden, she said, "I'm sorry. That's the, I said it again. I did it again. Sorry."

"Elen," said Alan.

"Mm."

"I should like to say something. It may take a moment. I would ask that you not interrupt."

She lifted her head a little.

He set down the blue mug on the arm of the chair. He folded his hands on his knees, in the old careful way, and looked, not at her, but at the great black bell in the beams, and gathered himself, as a man does before a long jump.

"I have examined you," said Alan. "For fourteen months. I wish that to be understood. I have been, for the greater part of that time, a person of habit and suspicion, and I have kept a notebook, and I have drawn conclusions. I have been wrong in all of them. I have watched you climb in by a window and be late for the Warden and break the curfew and the rules of the forest and, on one occasion, the structural integrity of a larder. And I have found, on each occasion, that I was looking at the wrong thing." He drew breath. "I was told, in a letter, that the company I keep must bear examination. I take that to be a reasonable instruction. I have therefore carried out an examination. You bear it."

She did not move.

"You bear it," said Alan, "in every particular. I should be glad to submit that finding to any Board. I should be glad to submit it to the Chair." His jaw tightened, and loosened. "And if the Bureau of Regulation and Statute requires of me that I be a person lesser than what I have become, in order to hold a post in it, then the Bureau may find itself another Valemont."

"Alan," said Elen, in a whisper.

"I said you were not to interrupt."

"I know. Sorry."

"I would add," said Alan, with enormous care, "that it was a very good idea to come up here. I wish I had had a room like it. I believe I should have been a good deal less correct."

She stared at him. Her eyes were swimming. It was very quiet in the clock, but for the great slow throb of the machine, and the faint drip of something from the roof beams, and far away, below, the sound of rooks.

"You asked me a question," said Alan, "on a terrace. And in a corridor. And in the Annex, on a Thursday. I gave you two answers that were true and not enough. I said I had not finished a sentence. I said I would, presently." He kept his eyes on the bell. "It is not yet presently. But I have been carrying part of the answer for some time. I think it is time to put down the part that I have."

Her hands closed on the edge of the quilt.

"You asked what I love," said Alan.

He heard the pendulum swing out. It paused. It came back.

"I love the sound a lamp makes when its wick has been trimmed correctly. I love a proof that closes. I love the smell of a gallery at night, and the way the snow looks from a high window, and a certain brass pen that was given to me by a man who never once told me he was pleased. I love the silence of a particular room in a library. I love the word presently, which I had thought to be a evasion, and which I find to be a form of hope." His voice had dropped, and he let it. "I love the smell of mint in wool. I love the way an old woman says extra cinnamon, as if it were a commandment. I love an appendix in which a sentence has lain for sixty years waiting to be read. I love the sound of a man's laugh in a larder at two in the morning, and a pot of porridge with a note beside it."

She was not breathing. He could feel it, through her shoulder.

"I love a person," said Alan, "who reads the amendments for sport. Who asks a tree for permission, and thanks it. Who carries her promises on a strip of paper, because she will not pretend that she does not need one, and because she is not ashamed of needing it. Who sits in the snow on a window seat and says, without a trace of reproach, that she will wait on her own account." He drew a long breath. "I love a person who is late. Who is wrong about the third article and the fourth, and right about everything that matters. Who is not correct."

His voice cracked.

"I did not know that was a thing a person could love. I had thought that love was a kind of approval. I had thought it was what one felt for a thing when it was in order. I had it from my father, in the shape of a letter. I find that I was mistaken." He turned, at last, and looked at her. "It is the opposite. It is the thing that remains, when one has stopped needing the other person to be otherwise."

The great wheels turned. The pendulum swung out and came back.

Elen had not moved. She sat in the cracked chair with the quilt round her shoulders and her hands clutched in the wool, and her face was bare. She had stopped crying. She was just looking at him, with her lips parted and her eyes enormous, as one looks at a thing that has been a long time on its way.

"That," she said at last, in a whisper, "is an answer to a different question."

"Yes."

"Which?"

"The one I did not finish on the terrace."

"You didn't say who."

"No."

"There wasn't a name in it. Not one." Her voice shook. "It was all, 'a person.' And 'an old woman.' And 'a man in a larder.' It was a whole list, and it didn't say her name."

"It did not."

"Why not?"

"Because I have only the list," said Alan. "I have not got the sentence. I know what is in it. I have known for some time. But I do not wish to give you a thing that is half made. I wish to give it to you whole, and in order, and in a place where I can be certain that I am speaking to you, and not to," he stopped. He did not go on. "I would not have you accept a fragment. You have had a great many people take a part of you and call it the whole."

She was silent.

Then, slowly, as a flower opens at the end of a long cold night, her whole face changed. It did not smile. It went soft all over. The lines round her mouth let go, and the tension went out of her shoulders, and her eyes filled again, and overflowed, and she did not wipe them.

"It's a lovely list," said Elen, thickly. "It's the loveliest list I've ever had. It's got, it's got room."

"I am glad."

"I like the room." She put her head down against his shoulder. She did it without hurry, without apology, as one lays down a thing that has been carried a very long way. "I don't need the end. I just wanted to know there was one."

He put his arm round her. It was a plain, quiet movement, and she fitted into it as though the shape of it had been waiting. His cheek came to rest against her hair, which smelled of mint and old dust and cold air. He did not say anything. For some time, they sat together in the huge brass heart of the Academy, with the pendulum swinging in front of them, and the pale bars of light moving slowly across the floor.

"I used to hate the last pillar," said Elen, into his coat.

"The last?"

"Review. The shears." She drew a small shaky breath. "I drew them in the garden, that night, in the Annex, and I felt a bit sick. Because it sounds so reasonable. 'You go back, after, and cut away what didn't serve.' That's what Miss Pargeter did. That's what the old man at the ledger did. That's pruning. It's the whole thing." She turned her cheek against his shoulder. "I thought, I'll never be able to let anyone near me with a pair of shears."

He was quiet a moment, thinking.

"A gardener," said Alan, "prunes because he loves the plant. That is true. A good one does. But he does so for the plant's sake, and not his own, and he does not do it without watching what the plant does." He moved his chin a fraction against her hair. "And a plant has the right to refuse the shears."

"Does it?"

"In my garden, it does."

"Since when?"

"Since just now," said Alan. "I have made the rule."

She made a sound. It was a half laugh, half hiccup, broken in the middle, and she put her hand up and gripped the front of his coat. "Oh," said Elen, shakily. "Oh, that's, nobody's ever said the plant gets a vote."

"It is an experimental clause."

"I'd like to see it in writing."

"I shall draft it," said Alan, "in full."

He put his hand into his breast pocket.

It was a small decision, and a large one. He did not give himself time to examine it. He drew out of his coat, from behind the cream notice and the green-edged strip, a single sheet of thin paper, folded in four, with the soft creases of a thing that has been opened and closed too often. He held it out. She took it. She unfolded it on her knee, in the pale light from the window, and read it.

It was not a long letter. It had a single line, written in the middle of the page, in small upright letters, with a blot at the end where a pen had been held too long.

I believe that what I love is

She read it. She read it for a long time, with her lips moving slightly. He watched her. He saw the exact moment when she understood that there was nothing after it. It was the seventh, the one he had written in a house a hundred miles away, on a night in August, by a lamp that had burned down.

"This is the incorrect one," said Elen, very softly.

"It is the seventh."

"It's the best letter I've ever been given."

"It has no end."

"I know." She was holding it carefully, by the edges, as if it were a butterfly. "That's why. It's all room. You could put anything in it." She looked up, and her eyes were brimming and quite clear. "Don't finish it. Not yet. I'd like to keep it a bit like that."

"I should be obliged," said Alan, "if you would keep it in a safe place."

"I'll put it with the hat."

"The hat is in your bag."

"It's going to be a very important bag," said Elen.

She folded the sheet along its creases. She did it with exquisite care, and slipped it into the inside pocket of her coat, over her heart, behind her new card, and buttoned the coat over it. She sat a moment, with her hand pressed flat against the place. Then she laid her head down against his shoulder again, and was quiet.

It was a very long time before either of them spoke.

The light moved. The bars slid slowly across the floor and up the great wheel, turning it gold. A dust-mote drifted across the pale air and was caught in the pendulum's wake. Somewhere far below, the old clock-keeper snored in his sleep, in time, and the cat, presumably, went on being a cat. It was a good place. It was, he thought, the best place he had ever been. He did not want it to end.

"Alan?" said Elen.

"Yes."

"Can I ask you something?"

"You may."

"Pip says," said Elen, slowly, against his coat, "that you watched me. In the first term. That you looked at me a lot, from across rooms, before we'd even spoken. He says he noticed it the second week. He says you never looked at anyone else the way you looked at me. Like I was a, he said, like I was a question."

He did not move.

"I never minded," said Elen. "I want to say that. I thought it was because I was loud. But I was wondering. About the first day. In the courtyard. When I was standing on the fountain with the birds." She drew a small careful breath. "I looked down, and you were staring at me. Like you'd seen a ghost. I thought, oh, he's frightened. And then I winked, because I'm an idiot. But I've been wondering since."

The pendulum swung out.

"What did you see?" said Elen. "That first day. What did you see, Alan?"

He opened his mouth.

It was a plain question. It was a kind one. She asked it with no pressure at all, her cheek against his shoulder, her hand curled loosely in his sleeve. And the answer was there, in his throat, a doorway full of snow and a small red-haired girl with a dimple on her left cheek and a voice that did not shake. It was only a sentence. It was only a few words. He had held it for eleven years.

He could not say it. He could feel it, whole, in his chest, like a stone he had swallowed long ago. And he knew, with absolute clarity, that if he said it now, here, in the middle of the thing she had just told him, he would be giving her a debt. She would learn that she had been the answer to something. That she had been looked at, from the first day, as a miracle that had stepped off a page. And what he had said, only a moment ago, was that he did not need her to be otherwise.

He shut his mouth.

Above them, in the hollow of the tower, something hummed. It was a very small sound, a thin high trembling note, so faint that he thought at first it was his own pulse. It came from the dark of the beams. It came from the great black bell, hanging silent and enormous in the roof, which had not moved, and had been touched by nothing, and had, he would have sworn, begun very softly to vibrate, as though it had heard.

Then the clock struck five.

It was a small sound compared to the machine, a single clear silver stroke from a little bell below, and it rang out through the tower and was followed by four more. Elen lifted her head. She looked at the window. She looked at the card in her pocket, and then at the wheel, and a smile began, slow and crooked and astonished, at the corner of her mouth.

"I'm on time," said Elen.

"You are."

"I said five. It's five." She put her hand against her coat, over the card, and the letter, and her heart. "I kept it. Water. I'm going to put a mark."

"I should say that it is in order."

"I'll ask you again," said Elen. She said it gently, against his sleeve, with her eyes closed. "Sometime. When it's not the middle of something. You don't have to answer today."

"Elen," said Alan.

"Mm?"

"Thank you for asking me up."

She smiled with her eyes shut. She did not say anything. The pendulum swung out through the last of the gold light, and hung, and came back, and the great bell in the roof was silent again, and the two of them sat on in the huge brass heart of the school, in a broken leather chair, among a thousand pressed leaves, while the hour went by.