They had made a court of the Great Hall.

It took Alan a moment to understand what had been done. The long benches of the refectory had been dragged to the walls and set in two ranks, facing inward, with a wide bare aisle of scrubbed boards between them. The four great hearths were cold. The high gray windows had been hung with black cloth, so that the morning came in only at the top, in thin bars, and the whole long room lay in a kind of underwater dusk. At the far end, where the high table had stood, a platform of new unpainted planks had been raised, three steps high, and on it, behind a long table spread with green baize, stood three tall carved chairs.

At the center of the aisle, alone, with nothing near it, stood a single stool.

It was ten o'clock on the twenty-third of January, a Tuesday. It was snowing again, thinly, and the sound of it against the windows was like the sound of a great many small dry fingers. Four hundred students sat packed along the walls in a silence so complete that Alan could hear the scrape of a boot at the back of the hall and the tick of the clock above the door.

He carried the ledger.

It was the club's, a long green book bound in cloth, with a spine that had been broken and mended and a clasp that no longer clasped. He carried it in both arms against his chest, as Dara had carried the herbal, and he came up the aisle between the ranks of the Academy with his eyes on the planks and his back very straight, and he knew where the Potions Club was sitting without looking. He could feel it, like a lamp on one side of his face.

They were in the front row of the left-hand rank: Mira, rigid, with her hands folded, and Dara, and Theo, scrubbed and pale and ghastly in his one clean shirt, and Wren, with her braid wound twice round her head and her mouth a thin dark line. At the end of the row sat Elen. She had put on the brown coat. She sat with her hands clenched in her lap and her chin up and her eyes fixed on the empty stool in the middle of the aisle, and she did not turn her head as he went by.

He had expected to sit with them. He had come up the aisle with the sentence ready: a place at the end of the row, the ledger on his knee. He had his foot on the first step of the left-hand ranks when a voice said, very softly, "Mr. Valemont."

It was Mr. Pym. He stood at the end of a small table at the foot of the platform, thin and gray, with his own ledger open before him and his long white hand extended in a gesture of gracious redirection.

"Please," said Mr. Pym. "Not there. The Chair has asked that witnesses to documents be seated beside the clerk. It is only a convenience. It keeps the papers together." He smiled. "The Warden has kindly consented to act."

Alan looked at the little table. It was set slightly to the right of the platform, on the Council's side of the hall, with two chairs. In one sat the Warden of the first-year hall, in her gray gown, with a pen and a sheet of foolscap and a face like a locked door. The other was empty.

He understood it perfectly. It was the most reasonable thing in the world. It was in the Regulations, and he could have quoted the article, and every one of the four hundred persons in the room would see that the Treasurer of the Potions Club had been placed, by procedure, at the elbow of the Council.

He crossed the aisle.

He did it without a sound. He sat down beside the Warden, and laid the ledger on the table, and folded his hands, and did not look to his left. Along the wall, among the packed ranks, he heard a very small, very distinct, indrawn breath. He did not look. He knew who it was.

"Mr. Valemont," said the Warden, without moving her lips, in a voice as dry as a ruler. "Sit up."

He sat up.

The three of them came in at ten past the hour, from a door behind the platform, and the whole hall rose.

The first was an enormously old man in a black gown, with a face like a dried apple and a trumpet in his hand, who was led to the left-hand chair by a footman and lowered into it with great ceremony. This was Lord Haldane, who had sat on the Standards Committee for fifty-one years and was understood to have heard the last thing said to him in the reign of the previous Queen. The second was a thin sharp woman in dove-gray silk, with a lorgnette on a chain and the beaked profile of a hawk who has found a mouse: Madam Quill. She took the right-hand chair and arranged herself in it with the swift dry movements of a bird settling.

And the third, last, in his gray coat, with his silver hair swept back from his forehead and his gloves in his hand, came to the center chair and stood with his head bowed.

"Please," said Aldric Voss. "Do sit."

They sat. The scrape of four hundred benches went round the walls like a wave. And in the silence that followed, Alan, who had been trained for seventeen years to read the edges of a room, saw the Chair lift his face, and let his gentle pale eyes travel slowly along the Potions Club's row, from end to end, and rest, for the smallest instant, on the girl in the brown coat. Then they passed on. He smiled sadly at the stool.

"I should like to begin," said Councillor Voss, "by saying that this is not a trial. No person is accused. We are here only because a young man is ill, and a number of other persons are afraid, and because it is the duty of this Committee to find out the truth as swiftly and as gently as it can." He lowered himself into the chair. "I will ask the Committee's physician to speak first. Doctor Lunt."

The stout bland physician came forward with his black bag, and spoke for twenty minutes.

Alan heard perhaps half of it. It was a smooth, rounded, rather melodious discourse, delivered in the voice of a man reciting a recipe he has made a thousand times. He spoke of the wrist. He spoke of the silvering. He opened a thick book bound in gray calf, the Council's Formulary, and read from page three hundred and eleven in a comfortable monotone, a passage concerning the effects upon the human skin of prolonged contact with infusions of the genus Campanula argentea, commonly known as silverbell, in high concentration. "A characteristic argentine discoloration," said Doctor Lunt, "of the integument at the points of greatest circulation, frequently accompanied by torpor, a chilling of the extremities, and a pronounced somnolence. It is in the literature. It is very well attested."

"Is it?" said Lord Haldane, loudly, into his trumpet.

"It is, my lord."

"Eh? What did he say?"

"He said it is well attested," said Madam Quill, in a voice like a dropped knife.

"Ah," said Lord Haldane, with satisfaction, and closed his eyes.

Alan sat with his hands folded on the green cloth. He had read page three hundred and eleven. He had read it the night before, by a lamp in the Annex, in the Council's own Formulary, which the Archivist had lent him with a single dry glance, and he had found, in the footnote, that the Campanula argentea of the entry was a lowland marsh-flower with a bitter root that grew in the delta of a river eleven hundred miles to the south, and that it was not the plant which Mother Tansy had given to a girl in a lantern-lit lane. It did not matter. It was a note in a book. The book was the Council's. And the physician had said it in a warm voice, with his hand on the cover.

"Healer-Mistress Brandt," said Voss.

She rose from the second row. She stood in her gray shawl like a stone in a stream. Her cropped iron hair stood on end, and her eyes under their shelf of brow were fixed on the Chair, and the whole hall waited.

"You have attended the patient."

"I have."

"You will understand that the Committee has reserved the formal findings of the infirmary. You will answer only what I ask." The voice was infinitely kind. "Is the patient's condition, in your judgment, consistent with a poisoning?"

A silence.

Alan saw the broad gray face harden. He saw her jaw work. He saw her glance, very briefly, to the left, along the front row of the Potions Club, to a girl with a swollen white face and a pair of enormous eyes, and he saw her look back at the Chair, and open her mouth.

"I cannot say," said Healer-Mistress Brandt.

It was the flattest possible voice. It was the voice of a woman who has been handed a very small box in which to put a very large thing.

"Thank you," said Voss. "Thank you so much, Healer. Please." And she sat.

"Professor Marlow," said the Chair.

The old man rose from the stool.

He had been sitting in the center of the aisle for forty minutes, alone, with his hands on his knees, in a clean waistcoat buttoned correctly, and he got up from it slowly, as a man gets up who has sat a long time on a hard seat. His white hair had been brushed flat. His spectacles caught the thin light from the windows. He stood with his hands clasped behind him and looked at the green baize, and at the three gray figures behind it, and at nothing.

"You are the responsible officer of the Potions Club."

"I am."

"The compound that was removed from the ice-house on Saturday morning was in your keeping."

"It was."

"It was an infusion of silverbell, prepared under your supervision by a student of the club, and kept in darkness for a period of one year, one day, and thirty-one days."

"It was."

"Professor." The Chair leaned forward, a very little, and his voice dropped, warm and confiding, as to an old friend across a small table. "Before the assay of the seventeenth of November, was that compound ever tasted by any person?"

The hall was perfectly still.

Alan went cold. He felt it begin at the base of his skull and go down his spine, and he thought, very clearly: here. He saw the whole of it, the long clean line, the ledger and the page and the pen. A Deviations box, in a hand like a ruled line. None. And a larder at two in the morning, and a girl on her knees with a jar in her lap, saying, Night four. Please don't turn.

He did not look at Marlow. He looked at the baize.

"Yes," said Professor Marlow.

It went round the hall like a gust. It was not a sound exactly. It was the rustle of four hundred people drawing breath at once.

"By whom?"

"By the applicant. Miss Elen Joy, a second-year student." His voice was not vague. It was perfectly level, and very quiet. "She tasted a drop of the brine, on the tip of a glass rod, at the end of each night, for six nights, before it was shown to me."

"Without a license."

"Without a license."

"In contravention of Article Thirty-four."

"Yes."

"You were informed, I think, on the sixth night."

"I was informed on the evening of the sixth night, by the applicant and the club's recorder, who brought me the notebook of the entries." He did not turn his head. "They had stopped, at that point, of their own accord. I judged that they had done so in good faith."

"And you reported it to the Warden."

"No."

"To the Committee?"

"No."

"To anyone?"

"To no one," said Marlow. "I imposed a sentence of my own. Six Saturdays of scrubbing glass. I judged that it was in proportion."

"Under what article?"

"Under none." The old man's jaw moved. "I acted as a teacher. I believed it was within my discretion."

"For fourteen months," said Voss, very gently, "you held that discretion."

"I did."

"You concealed a violation of the Assay Regulations, in the keeping of a compound that you now agree may have harmed a student, from every authority of this Academy, for fourteen months, because you judged that it was in proportion."

The silence was so long that Alan heard a flake of snow strike the glass and slide down it.

"Yes," said Marlow.

Beside the Chair, Madam Quill raised her lorgnette and examined the old man through it with the fixed bright interest of a bird contemplating a worm. Lord Haldane, who had caught none of it, said "Eh?" into his trumpet and was told by his neighbor, in a stage whisper, that the Professor had admitted it.

"Admitted what?"

"All of it."

"Ah," said Lord Haldane. "Honest man." And his chin sank slowly onto his chest.

"Thank you, Ambrose," said Voss, with infinite regret. "Thank you. I know how hard that was."

He did not answer. He stood perfectly straight, with his white head up, and his hands clasped so tightly behind him that the knuckles stood out like a row of small stones.

"I should like to speak."

It was a high clear cracked voice, and it came from the left-hand rank.

Elen had risen. She stood in her place at the end of the Potions Club's row with her fists at her sides and her face the color of paper. She did not wait to be recognized. "I'm the applicant. I'm the one he's talking about. I should be asked."

"Miss Joy." The Chair turned his gentle eyes on her. "Of course. Please. Come forward."

She came out into the aisle. She walked up it to the stool, and did not sit, and stood beside it with one hand on the wooden seat. She looked very small in that great dim room. She looked at the three gray faces. She did not look to her right, to the little table at the foot of the platform, where a boy in a dark coat sat very straight with his hands on a green ledger. He saw her not look.

"Everything he said is true," said Elen.

Her voice shook, and steadied.

"I tasted it. A drop on a rod. Six nights, in the larder under the kitchens, in the dark. I'd been told it was meant to be done in the dark. I wanted to know if it was turning. I knew it was against the rule. I did it anyway." She drew a breath. "I want it written down that Professor Marlow didn't know. He found out on the sixth night, because I told him, because the boy who was keeping the record said we should, and Professor Marlow said it had to stop and it stopped. He gave us six Saturdays. We scrubbed the glass. I sang the whole way."

A ripple of something that was not laughter ran along the wall, and died.

"And nothing happened to me," said Elen. "I was perfectly well. I'm still perfectly well. It was six drops of salt water with a flower in it, a year and a half ago, and I'm standing in front of you." Her mouth trembled. "It doesn't do that. It doesn't do what's on Kieran's wrist. It steadies a hand. It steadied one for forty-one minutes, on an apparatus. You can read it."

"We have read it," said Voss.

He had risen, a little, from his chair. He stood behind the green baize with his fine hands resting on the cloth, and his face, long and mild and lined with sorrow, bent toward her with a look of such tender pain that Alan felt the whole room lean toward it.

"Miss Joy," said the Councillor. "I should like to say that I have seldom heard a student speak with such candor. It does you the greatest credit. I should like that to be noted." He turned his head. "Madam Quill?"

"Noted," said Madam Quill, drily, and wrote something on a pad.

"You tasted it six times, without a license, and told no one but your teacher. You were punished privately. And no one else knew." He sighed. "It is a very honest account. I fear it is also a very complete one." He let it hang. "Please sit, my dear."

She stood a moment. She stood quite still beside the stool, with her hand on the seat and the whole hall looking at her, and Alan saw her mouth open, and shut. She had seen it. She had seen exactly what she had done, with every word true, in the most perfect candor, in her own cracked voice. She had put six bricks into the wall.

She went back to her place.

She went down the aisle with her chin up and her eyes fixed on nothing, and sat down at the end of the row between Wren and the wall, and Wren, without turning her head, put out a hand and gripped her wrist. It was the only movement in the whole of the Potions Club.

"The Treasurer," said Voss. "Mr. Valemont, if you would be so good."

He rose.

He rose from the little table with the ledger in his arms and went the three paces to the stool, and set the book down on the boards at the foot of it, and stood with his hands at his sides. He did not look left. He knew that she was looking. He felt it on the side of his face like a draft from an open door, and he kept his eyes on the Chair, and thought of nothing at all.

"You are the Treasurer of the club."

"I am. In a supervisory capacity."

A very faint ripple went through the hall. Someone at the back, a first-year, had begun to laugh and been silenced by an elbow.

"You will have the stock ledger."

"I have."

"I should like to ask you about a page." The Chair's voice was a caress. "The page for the eleventh of November of last year. An entry on that page appears to have been amended."

"It was." Alan bent, and opened the book at a leaf he did not need to find, and held it up. "By me. On that day. I was asked by Miss Mira, the club's steward, to look over her accounts. A quantity of nightroot extract had been entered twice, once as spoiled and once as consumed in practice. The total was three vials. I struck out the second entry, and initialed it, and dated it, and wrote in the margin the word Corrected. The original entry remains legible. The amendment is attached, in my hand, with the working."

"How very orderly," said Voss.

"It is the only way I know."

"Three vials," said Madam Quill.

She had put down her lorgnette. Her voice was dry and light and entirely without malice, and it went into the quiet like a needle. "Nightroot extract. It is, I believe, a very strong soporific. A substance that produces, in sufficient quantity, a profound torpor." She looked down the length of her beaked nose at the long green book. "And these three vials were entered as spoiled, and as consumed, and the Treasurer, a month later, with the stroke of a pen, determined that they had been neither."

"I determined that one of the two entries was a duplicate, madam. The vials were consumed. They were consumed, in an accident, on the fourteenth of October, in a practical."

"What sort of accident?"

"An explosion."

"How convenient," said Madam Quill, softly.

"If I may," said a voice.

It was Theo. He had stood up in the front row, shaking from head to foot, with his sandy hair on end and his broad, burned, honest face scarlet to the ears, and he looked as a man looks who has been waiting a week for the chance to do one useful thing. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It was me. It was my cauldron. I'd put in a, I was being thorough, and the whole thing went up, and it took out the eyebrows, and the vials, and a bit of the ceiling." He drew a ragged breath. "I was the, the one who consumed it. Through my eyebrows. There were seven of us. Professor Marlow was standing right there with a bucket."

There was a pause.

Then, at the back of the hall, with a small sound like a squeak, someone began to laugh. It spread. It ran along the wall like a spark in dry grass, helpless, appalled, immensely relieved: four hundred people who had been holding their breath for an hour, who had been looking at a stool and a green baize table and a thin gray clerk, suddenly saw a large young man in a clean shirt stand up in front of the Council and explain that he had consumed a sleeping draught through his eyebrows. It broke over the room in a wave. Lord Haldane woke, and said "What is it? What's the joke?" and nobody told him.

"Silence," said the Warden.

It was a single word, flat and iron, from the little table beside Alan, and it fell on the hall like a lid. The laughter died. She sat with her pen in her fist, and her narrow face did not move, but for the barest instant, in the bar of gray light from the window, Alan could have sworn that the corner of her mouth had twitched.

"Thank you, Mr. Theo," said Voss, with a faint smile. "It is a very vivid account. I do not doubt a word of it." He turned back to Alan. "Mr. Valemont. A last question."

"Sir."

"I put it to you as a person of unusual accuracy." It was said so lightly. It lay in the air of the hall like a leaf on water. "You are, I think, the only person present who has kept a complete record of this club's proceedings, over a period of fifteen months. In your own estimation, Mr. Valemont, did the Potions Club comply with the Charter of this Academy and the Regulations of the Board of Assay?"

The hall held its breath.

Alan did not move.

He stood at the foot of the platform with his hands at his sides and the ledger at his feet, in the gray underwater light, and he heard a number of things at once. He heard the snow on the glass. He heard the faint tick of the clock above the door. He heard, very distinctly, in the long gap between one question and its answer, a voice that was not his own, low and soft and a little cracked, in a gallery under a hundred thousand stars, saying: I'd always rather be frightened with you than safe without.

He thought: it is a question of truth.

He thought: I have never in my life been asked a question to which I could not give the true answer.

He thought of a man who had said, in a cold tower, with great gentleness, say only what is true; say rather less of it than you are able. And he thought that he had been asked a plain question, under oath, by the Chair of the Committee, in front of the whole of the Academy, and that there was only one thing in the world that Alan Valemont knew how to do with a plain question.

"No," said Alan.

He heard it go out across the hall. It was a small clear word, entirely steady, and it was followed by a silence in which he could not hear a single person breathe.

"Not in every particular."

"Would you be so kind," said Voss, softly, "as to name them?"

"There were four." His voice did not shake. He had never in his life been so grateful for the discipline of his own throat. "The first is the tasting. The compound was tasted, six times, by an unlicensed person, before its examination. That is a violation of Article Thirty-four, and I was a witness to it, and I recorded it in a private notebook, and I did not record it in the Phase One report."

"The Deviations box," said Voss, "read None."

"It did. I considered that the tasting lay outside the protocol of the assay, and was a matter of the Regulations. I was wrong." He kept his eyes on the Chair. "It should have been entered. It was an omission of mine."

A sound ran along the left-hand wall, a small and terrible one, as of a thing that has been cut.

"The second," said Alan, "is that the compound was kept for fourteen months without the authority of the Board. It was not filed until the first of March of the present year, and we had intended that. But it was kept."

"The third."

"The sentence was not reported. Professor Marlow has said so. It is a breach of the duty of a teacher to the Warden, and I did not urge him to it, and I should have." He drew breath. "The fourth is a lapse of labeling. On a Wednesday in October, in the greenhouse, a number of jars in the club's stock were unlabeled for a period of about forty minutes, due to a, due to a delay, and a practical was postponed. I was present. I assisted in the correction."

He stopped. His throat was very dry.

He did not look at her. He had said it. He had said every one of them in order, in the clear flat voice of a boy reading out the bill, and each of them had been true, and each had had a name in it that was not named. A drop on a rod. A larder in the dark. A card that said Water. A girl who had been late, once, and run.

She was sitting very quietly at the end of the row.

He knew that without looking. He felt it, as one feels the silence in a room where a door has just been closed. He felt it as one feels a rope that has been paid out to its end, and holds, and is not going to give any more.

"I should add one thing," said Alan.

"Please."

"None of these, in my judgment, has any bearing on the condition of Mr. Pell." He heard his own voice, very level, ring out in the cold. "The compound was examined on an apparatus, in the presence of an independent observer, and the gauge of harm remained clear for the whole of the period. The tasting did no injury to the person who performed it. I know of no evidence, none, that connects the silverbell to a thread of silver at a boy's wrist. I believe that the Committee's physician is mistaken."

The hall breathed.

"In your judgment," said Voss.

"Yes."

"Which is not the Committee's."

"No, sir." He did not look away. "It is only mine."

"Thank you, Mr. Valemont." The Chair bowed his silver head, very slightly, with an expression of grave and sorrowing gratitude, as to a man who has done a hard thing well. "That will be all. You have been most helpful. I should like it recorded that you have been extremely helpful."

He went back to the little table. He sat down, beside the Warden, with the ledger in his lap, and put his hands on it. They were quite steady. He looked at the green baize. And across the aisle, on the left-hand wall, at the end of a front row of white and stricken faces, he felt a pair of eyes rest on him. He felt them for a long moment. They were not angry. They were quite clear, and quite steady, and wide, and he felt them go over him slowly, as eyes go over a thing one has known for a very long time and is seeing for the first time from another side.

He did not turn his head.

The findings were read at a quarter to one.

The Chair delivered them standing. He did it in his warm low voice, without notes, with his hands on the baize and his eyes on the middle distance, like a man reciting a prayer he has said many times before. The Committee found that a number of irregularities had been disclosed in the conduct of the Potions Club. It found that these had been, in the main, candidly acknowledged. It did not find that any person had acted in bad faith. It did find, with regret, that it was impossible, on the evidence before it, to exclude a connection between the compound that had been kept in the club's care and the condition of Mr. Kieran Pell, and that pending a proper analysis, which the Committee's physician would undertake under seal, that compound would be retained.

The Potions Club was closed.

Professor Ambrose Marlow was relieved of all duties of teaching and of direction, with immediate effect, pending the decision of the full Council as to his rank, which would be made in the spring.

Mr. Pell would remain in the infirmary, under the protection of the Committee.

"No student," said Voss, "is accused of anything. I should like that to be very plain. I am so very glad of it."

"I accept," said Marlow.

It was a very small voice. He stood on the boards in the middle of the hall, in his clean waistcoat, quite straight, and his spectacles shone in the gray light, and nobody could see his eyes.

"The Academy," said a dry voice, "notes the Committee's finding."

It was the Warden.

She had risen from her chair beside Alan. She stood narrow and upright in her gray gown with her pen in one hand and her foolscap in the other, and she spoke in a voice like a ruler laid flat on a desk, to the Chair, without any expression at all.

"And records its objection to the pace."

There was a pause.

"Madam Warden?" said Voss, gently.

"The finding was prepared before the evidence was taken," said the Warden. "I have been clerk to this Academy for thirty years. I know what a finding looks like when it has been written in advance. It is the handwriting." She laid down her pen, quite precisely, parallel to the edge of the paper. "It is for the record. Please enter it."

Nobody moved. Madam Quill's lorgnette had slipped half an inch. Lord Haldane, who had caught the last four words, said "Eh? What? Who's objecting?" and was ignored.

"It shall be entered," said Voss.

His voice had not changed. It was as warm and gentle and rueful as before, and his face was a long lined mask of sorrowing courtesy, and for the briefest of moments, no longer than the flick of an eyelid, Alan, who had been watching him for an hour, saw the pale eyes rest on the Warden's narrow gray face. They were quite empty. They were like windows in a house where no one lives.

"Thank you, Madam," said Aldric Voss. "I honor it. Please. The Committee is adjourned."

The hall rose.

They were dispersing by the long aisle, in knots and strings, in an enormous low rustling murmur, and no one was speaking above a whisper. The ranks broke up. The black cloths were being drawn from the windows. And down the center of the room, escorted by two silent men in gray, with his hands behind him and his white head bent, an old man was being led away.

He came past the little table.

He did not stop. He did not turn his head. But as he went by, at the very edge of Alan's chair, in a voice so low that it was barely more than a movement of the lips, and so quiet that the guards at his elbows did not hear, Professor Marlow said:

"Well said, Mr. Valemont."

Alan sat perfectly still.

"Every word was true."

He went on. He went on down the aisle between the two silent men, tall and bent and gray, with his waistcoat buttoned correctly, and he did not look back, and the doors at the end of the hall opened and let in a bar of cold white light, and closed behind him.

It was the kindest thing that anyone had said to him that day. He knew that. He sat with his hands on the green ledger and heard it, over and over, in the empty air, and understood, with a slow, sinking, awful clarity, that it was also the cruelest. Every word was true. That was exactly what he had done.

"Mr. Valemont."

He rose.

Councillor Voss had come down from the platform. He was drawing on his gloves, finger by finger, with his head a little on one side, and the long gentle face was turned toward Alan with an expression of warm, quiet, almost fatherly approval. He stopped at the little table. He laid one gloved hand, lightly, on Alan's shoulder.

"I wished to say," said Voss, "that you gave honest testimony."

"Sir."

"I do not often hear it. I mean it as a very high compliment." The hand pressed, a very little, and was gentle. "It will be remembered. In the matter of the cadetship. I should be sorry if you thought that anything said in this room would be held against you. Quite the reverse." He smiled. "You have shown us exactly what a Valemont is."

He did not wait for an answer. He gave the shoulder a last small pat, as one pats a good horse, and went away across the boards toward the door behind the platform, with Mr. Pym at his elbow murmuring, and the silver head held high.

Alan stood with the weight of the hand still on him.

And across the hall, at the very end of the left-hand rank, framed in the great doorway with the light behind her, small and brown and quite still, stood Elen.

She had been looking. He knew that. She had watched the hand come down, and the pat, and the long gray back go away. She stood in the doorway with her bag on her shoulder and her face as white as chalk and her eyes enormous, and she was not crying. She looked at the place on his shoulder where a gloved hand had lain. Then she looked at him.

It lasted perhaps two seconds.

Then she turned. She did not run. She walked away, down the passage, into the gray, with her back straight and her head up, and he heard her boots on the stone, light and steady and growing fainter, until they stopped.

"She's gone to the clock tower," said a voice at his elbow.

It was Pip. He had come up through the milling crowd, pale and rumpled and anxious, with his waistcoat undone and a charcoal smear across his forehead, and his round freckled face was entirely without humor. "I saw her go. She won't answer me. Wren's gone after her and been told to go away. Alan, I'm not neutral. I want to say that. I think, I think you should."

"Yes," said Alan.

He did not move. He found that he could not. He stood with the ledger in his arms and his feet on the boards of a hall that was slowly emptying, and said, to himself, in the level, careful voice of a man reciting a statute: I shall not do it again without telling her why.

He did not know why.

He could not find it. He turned it over and over, as he had turned over a hundred other things, and it would not come. He had told the truth. He had said every word in order, and every word had been correct. He had said what had to be said, and he would say it again, because it was the only thing that he knew how to do. And there was no reason in the world that he could give her that would make her put out her hand.

"Mr. Valemont."

It was the Warden.

She was standing at his elbow with her list clutched in her fist and her gray gown pulled straight, and she was not looking at him. She was looking at the great double doors at the end of the hall, where a bar of cold light lay across the boards. Her face was as stern and still as it had ever been. But her voice, when she spoke, was lower than he had ever heard it, and a little rough.

"I have kept the record of this hearing," said the Warden. "I wrote down every word you said. It was perfectly accurate."

"Thank you, Warden."

"It was not a compliment." She turned her head. She looked at him, for the first time in two years, directly, with her gray eyes, and he saw that they were not stern at all. They were very tired. "I have kept rules for thirty years, Mr. Valemont. I have kept them better than almost anyone alive. I wish to tell you something that I have learned."

He waited.

"Accuracy," said the Warden, "is not the same as justice."

She did not wait for his answer. She tucked her pen into the pocket of her gown, and gathered her foolscap, and walked away down the long empty aisle with her back like a ruled line, and did not look round.

He stood alone in the Great Hall.

The black cloths had been drawn from the windows, and the thin gray daylight lay along the scrubbed boards, and the stool stood in the middle of the aisle where nobody had moved it. The platform was empty. The three tall chairs stood behind their green table like a row of mute judges. Somewhere in the long rafters a sparrow was fluttering and had not found the way out.

He thought of a night, in a gallery, with the snow coming down. He thought of a very small voice saying, in the dark, with perfect gentleness: I'd always rather be frightened with you than safe without. He had thought that it was the best thing that anyone had ever said to him.

He had stood in front of four hundred people, in a cold gray room, and chosen safe.

It had been so easy. That was the horror of it. He had not even had to decide. It had come up in him as water comes up in a well, clear and cold and entirely natural, and he had said it, and it had been true. And a girl whom he loved, with her chin up and her eyes enormous, had stood in a doorway and watched a gloved hand on his shoulder, and turned away.

He put the ledger under his arm. He did not go to the clock tower. He walked, slowly, with his hand pressed flat against the cover of the book, out into the cold, and did not once look round.