Healer-Mistress Brandt had a gift for the exact use of a rule.

It was perhaps the only gift she had ever admitted to. She stood at the door of the dispensary at four minutes to noon on Tuesday, the sixth of February, with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and her iron hair standing on end, and looked along the line of four persons in front of her with the dispassionate attention of a quartermaster inspecting a draft. They wore aprons. They were gray, and very large, and smelled of starch and carbolic, and each of them had been given a white cotton cap that did nothing whatever to improve the effect.

"I look," said Wren, in a low and bitter voice, "like a nun who has lost a bet."

"You look like an orderly," said Brandt. "That is the point."

"My cap's on backward," said Dara. It had slid forward over his eyebrows and he was peering from under it like a small and anxious owl.

"It does not matter which way a cap is on." She reached out and set it right with one large rough hand. "The order says the patient may be attended by the Healer-Mistress as she sees fit. It does not say by whom she sees fit. It does not say that she may not be short-handed. I have been short-handed since the autumn. I have said so, in writing, to a Mr. Pym, who replied that he was very sorry." She straightened. "Linen, Mr. Valemont. You are the linen."

She put a stack of folded sheets into his arms. They were heavy, and cold, and smelled of lavender, and he stood holding them with a face of perfect composure and a heart that was going like a drum, because somebody at the back of his mind had observed that it was the wrong lavender, and that he would never, in all his life, be able to smell it again without thinking of a door.

"Keep your eyes down," said Brandt. "Say nothing. Make noise. A person who is sweeping is a person nobody looks at."

Elen was beside him.

She had her cap on the top of her head, perched on its rope of red hair like a small white boat on a wave, and she was holding a broom upside down. She had not looked at him once since they came out of the corridor. He knew exactly why. It was the same reason that his own hands, under the sheets, were not quite steady. They had sat on a cold stair the night before with her head on his shoulder, and now it was noon, in the daylight, in aprons, and they were about to walk into a room where a boy lay with a thread of silver round his wrist, and neither of them knew what to do with a face.

"The broom," said Alan, very low.

"What about it?"

"It is upside down."

"It's a very sophisticated sweeping technique," said Elen, without turning her head. But the corner of her mouth was going, and she turned the broom the right way up, and he felt, absurdly, a little less afraid.

The sergeant was at the ward door.

He was seated on a hard chair beside it, in the Council's gray, with his cap on his knee and his square hands folded on it, and he was looking at his boots. He was a man of perhaps forty-five, broad and short-necked, with a weathered face that had been honest for a good many years and had begun, lately, to find it a strain. A faint line ran between his brows. He looked up as they came down the corridor, and his eyes went from the Healer-Mistress to the line behind her, and rested there.

"Healer," said Sergeant Rackham.

"Sergeant. My orderlies. I have asked three times for staff. I have four. It will do."

"Four," said the sergeant.

He did not say it as a question. He looked at them one by one, as they passed in single file, at a large young woman in a cap with her chin up and a thin boy with his hands in his sleeves and a short red-haired girl with a broom. And when he came to the tall dark-haired one at the end with the sheets, he said, quite quietly, "Name?"

"Valemont," said Alan.

There was a pause. The sergeant's face did not change. But something went across it, very briefly, a slight settling, as of a man who has been waiting a long time for a thing to be said and has just heard it.

"Linen," said the sergeant.

"Yes."

He took up the Watch Book from the floor beside his chair, and opened it on his knee, and wrote in it with a stub of pencil. Alan did not look. He saw the angle of the hand, and the upright strokes, and heard the faint dry scratch, and knew exactly what it said. It said twelve oh four, and Healer's staff, four, for cleaning. It did not say whose.

"Mind the draught," said Sergeant Rackham, to the page. "The patient's by the window."

They went in.

It was a long white room with twelve narrow iron beds in a row, eleven of them empty and stripped to their blue-ticked mattresses, and a high window at the end through which the pale light of noon fell in a long bar across the boards. It was very quiet. Somewhere a tap was dripping. Nothing moved. And at the farthest bed, under the window, with a gray blanket drawn to his chest and his long loose limbs laid out straight as a child's, with his hay-colored hair damp on the pillow and his mild crooked face turned a little toward the glass, lay Kieran Pell.

Elen put down the broom.

She did it quite gently, against the wall, and walked down the length of the ward without a word, past the empty beds, with her cap crooked and her apron strings trailing. She did not hurry. She stopped at the side of the bed, and sat down on the edge of the narrow mattress, and took up the long white hand that lay on the blanket, and held it in both of hers.

"Right then, Kieran," said Elen.

Her voice was low. It cracked a little on the second word.

"It's only us. It's me, and Wren, and Dara. And Alan, who's very formal." She did not look round. "We've come to do the floors. Healer Brandt's been awfully short."

He did not stir. He lay as he had lain a fortnight ago in the lamp-glow, with his chest rising slowly and falling slower, and his lips a little parted, and a smear of nothing on his chin where somebody had at last thought to wipe it. His skin was the gray-white of candle wax. And round the thin wrist, close under the knob of the bone, three turns of silver lay on the skin, as a thread lies on cloth.

It was faint, in the noon light. It did not glow. It lay there, dull and bright at once, like a hair of moonlight, and as Alan stood at the end of the bed with his arms full of sheets he saw it move. It was not a movement of the thread. It was a pulse, very slow and perfectly even, running along its length like breath along a string, and it kept, quite exactly, the time of the long pale hand that held it.

Fifty-two, he thought. It will be fifty-two.

Wren had come to the other side of the bed.

She did not say anything. She bent, as she had bent on the night of the nineteenth, with her braid swinging forward and her face a few inches from the wrist, and shut her eyes, and drew a slow breath through her nose. She held it. She let it out. Then she straightened, and her face was very white, and she looked across the bed at Alan and gave the smallest nod.

"Iron," said Wren, so low that he barely heard. "Cold. And the other. It's stronger than it was."

"Recorded," said Alan.

He said it as one lays a stone. He saw Elen's shoulders move, once. Then he set the sheets on the empty bed beside the window, and took from the pocket of his apron a small thing of dark brass with a cap of horn, and held it out across the blanket to the thin boy in the cap.

"Dara," he said. "You read the small hand best."

Dara took it. His fingers were shaking so that the lens rattled against his thumbnail, and he gripped it in both hands until it stopped. He drew a breath. He bent over the thin gray wrist with his cap falling forward, and raised the glass, and for a long time there was no sound in the ward but the dripping of the tap.

"It's very small," said Dara.

"Take your time."

"There's something between the second turn and the third. It's, I can't, it's like a smear of silver." He moved the lens a hair. His breath caught. "No. It isn't a smear. It's, oh. It's lines."

Nobody moved.

"It's a picture," said Dara, in a thread of a voice. "It's tiny. It's no bigger than a grain of barley, just as she said. It's pressed into the thread. There's a ring round it, a very thin ring, and inside there's." He swallowed. "A key. Upright. With a ward like a flag. And across the foot of it, there's, scales. A beam and two pans."

"Key above scales," said Alan.

"Yes."

"Is there a legend?"

"Round the ring. In Old Court." Dara's voice shook. He was turning the lens by fractions, as a man turns a dial. "Four words. They're very, it's the court hand, the little one. It says." He stopped. His lips moved. "Weigh. And keep."

"Weigh it," said Alan. "Keep it."

He had heard it, as a boy, in his father's house. He had heard it repeated in a dry voice over the mantel of the long drawing room, with the Valemont arms in plaster above and the portraits going away down the wall like a procession of the dead. It was the motto of the Standards Committee. It was cut in stone over the door of the Warded Chamber. He had always thought it a very fine one.

"There's more," said Dara. "On the left pan. The scales aren't, they aren't even. There's a chip. Something's gone out of the rim." He bent closer, with his tongue between his teeth. "A notch. A small one. About a third of the way round. As if it had been dropped."

Alan went still.

He did not know why. It was a small thing, a notch in a pan in a picture the size of a grain, and it had stirred something very far back in him, as one half remembers the shape of a word. He stood with one hand on the iron rail of the bed and stared at the thread, and the whole bright quiet ward seemed to draw itself in around a single image, a piece of thick cream paper laid on a desk in a long gray room, in a warm lamplight, with a hand on the edge of it.

"Wait," said Alan.

He put his hand into the breast of his apron. He had worn his coat under it, on purpose, for the pockets. He drew out a folded packet, soft with a week's handling, and sorted through it with his fingers: a receipt, an Archivist's chit, a strip of paper with a row of pencil tallies and a very small star. And a card. It was thick, and cream-colored, and slightly curled, with a bit of green ribbon still stuck to one corner where it had been tied to a file.

It was the letter that had come to him on the eighteenth of January. It was an invitation to an interview, on behalf of the Standards Committee, in the matter of a candidacy. It was written in a long clear beautiful hand. And in the lower right corner, where the signature should have been, there was no ink at all, only a blind impression in the paper, pale and shadowed and raised, like the ghost of a coin.

He took the lens from Dara. He held it over the corner of the card.

He did not breathe.

It came up out of the cream paper under the glass as a figure comes up out of mist: a key, upright, with a ward like a flag; a beam; two pans. A ring round them, a very fine one. And the left pan, at about a third of the way round the rim, was chipped. It was a small bright bite, no larger than a seed, as if the die had been dropped, once, a very long time ago, on a stone floor.

"The same," said Alan.

He said it in a whisper.

"What?" said Wren.

"It is the same chip." He lifted his eyes. "It is identical. It is the same die."

Dara gave a soft gasp. Elen had turned on the edge of the bed, with the long gray hand still held in hers, and her face had gone as white as the sheets.

"Let me see," she said.

He gave her the card. He gave her the lens. She bent over the one and then over the other, back and forth, from the cream corner to the silver thread, three times, four, and when she looked up her eyes were enormous.

"He signed him," said Wren.

It came out flat and low and perfectly distinct, in the quiet of the ward. She was looking at the thin gray wrist, and the dark line of her mouth had gone thin as a wire. "He put his name on Kieran. It's his own letter paper. He put his signature on a boy."

"With his own hand," said Elen.

"He did not need to," said Alan.

They looked at him.

"It is what the book says. The binder may not deny his hand." He heard his own voice, level and cold, in the long white room, and he did not try to warm it. "He could have used a clerk's. He could have used a ring that was not his. He used the Seal itself. I think that it did not occur to him that anyone would look."

"Because nobody does," said Elen. "Look."

"Because nobody had a glass."

There was a sound behind them.

It was a very small sound. It was the creak of a hard chair, and the rustle of a heavy tread across a board, and it stopped some six feet from the foot of the bed. They turned. Sergeant Rackham stood in the middle of the ward, with his cap in his hand and the Watch Book under his arm, a short square gray man in the white bar of the window, and he did not look at any of them. He looked at the thread.

Nobody said a word.

"I stood in the door," said Sergeant Rackham.

He said it quite quietly, to the boy on the pillow.

"The whole of the hour. They tell me to. It's my post. I stand inside it, in the angle, with my face to the wall. I'm told that's courtesy. I'm told the Chair likes to be private with a sick lad." His broad hand tightened on the cap. "I've faced the wall twice. The first morning, when he sat the hour. And the Saturday night. The night before last Sunday, I mean."

"You were present," said Alan, very softly.

"I was in the room." The sergeant's weathered face did not move. "I never saw a thing. I'd my eyes on a bit of plaster. There's a crack in it, shaped like a river. I know that crack better than my own wife." He drew a breath. "But I can hear."

The tap dripped.

"He talks," said Rackham. "Low. Not any words I know. It's not the common speech. It's the old kind, like what they have in the chapel, only it doesn't go up and down the same. It goes round and round. Like a nurse singing a bairn to sleep." He swallowed. "And the lad's thread sings with him. It's a high thin sound, like a wet finger on a glass. And at the end of it there's a kind of, a click. Like a latch."

"And the voice," said Alan.

"I'd know it in my grave." The sergeant lifted his eyes, at last, and they were gray and honest and very tired. "Twelve years. I've guarded that gentleman twelve years. Over the stair at the Chamber. I've heard him give a thousand orders, soft as silk. I know his voice the way I know my own cough." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I don't like it."

"No," said Alan.

"I never liked it. I wrote in the book that I'd been told. It's the only thing I could do. I thought, it's down. If it's ever wanted, it's down in my hand." He looked at the boy. "He played cards with me once. The lad. When he'd done the lamps. He lost four pennies to me, and he said, 'That's all right, Sergeant, I never had a head for it.' And he laughed. He's got a laugh like a gate."

"Sergeant," said Alan.

He set the card and the lens down on the blanket. He did it slowly. He found, a little to his surprise, that his hands were steady.

"If you were asked," said Alan, "by the Archivist of this Academy, in the proper form, what you had heard in this room at the hour of the tying, would you say it?"

The sergeant stood a long moment.

"I'm a soldier," he said. "I do as I'm told."

"I know."

"I've done what I was told for thirty-one years. I've never once had cause to do other. I've always thought it was the right way to be." His voice cracked, very slightly. "It was the right way. Till it wasn't." He drew a breath. "I don't tell lies. I never have. If I'm asked a question straight I answer it. It's the one thing I've got."

"And under oath?"

"Nobody's ever asked me to swear," said Sergeant Rackham. "Not in all my service. Not once." His eyes went to the window. "It'd have to be a proper one. With a book. And somebody with the right to take it."

"The Archivist has," said Alan. "Jointly with the Clerk. It is in the Statute."

"Then draw it up."

It was said very low, and very quickly, as a man steps off a wall. The sergeant put his cap on his head and took it off again. He looked, for a moment, almost astonished.

"I'll not break my post," he said. "I'm on the door. I'll stay on it. But I'm in the room." He nodded slowly. "You'd best know that. In case it's wanted."

"It is wanted," said Alan.

"Then I'll be where I'm put." He turned toward the door, and stopped, and without looking round, in the same flat tone in which he might have remarked on the weather, he added, "That linen cupboard. At the foot. The hinge sticks. I've mentioned it to the Healer." He put his cap on. "It makes a most awful noise when it's opened. Somebody ought to oil it."

"I have oil," said Healer-Mistress Brandt.

She was standing in the dispensary doorway with her arms folded. She had been there, apparently, for some time. Her broad face was entirely without expression.

"Do you," said Sergeant Rackham.

"A good many kinds."

"I thought you might." He nodded to her, gravely, as one officer to another, and walked back to his chair in the corridor, and sat down, and opened the Watch Book on his knee. He did not look up again.

Elen was still holding Kieran's hand.

She had not moved through any of it. She sat on the edge of the mattress with her cap crooked and her eyes on the boy's still face, and as the door shut behind the sergeant she bent her head, and said into the quiet, in a very small cracked voice that was almost a laugh:

"Did you hear that, Kieran? He's on our side. A bit. Bartholomew will be so pleased." She laid her cheek, for an instant, against the back of the long cold hand. "We're going to get you out. I'm telling you so you'll know. It's the one proper thing."

Alan looked away.

He did it as one looks away from a person at prayer. He went to the window, and stood with his back to the room, and for a time he looked out at a bare white forecourt and a gray sky and the black flank of the east wing, and the dull winter light lay along his hands. When he turned, she was standing beside him with the broom in her fist, and her face washed clean.

"You've got the lens," said Elen.

"I have."

"And the card."

"I have the card." He drew a breath. "I should like to look at one other thing before we are done."

He found it in the library at two.

It was a thing that he had been told, as a child, was known to everyone, and had never in his life had occasion to verify. He took the Calendar down from the Reference shelf, a great thick blue book with a cracked spine, printed every year on poor paper for the use of the Academy, and carried it to the end of the long table. The Charter was in the back. It ran to forty pages, in small type, with a Schedule at the end of each Part, and he turned them, one by one, in the cold bar of daylight from the west window, with Elen standing at his shoulder and her breath on his ear.

"What are we looking for?" said Elen.

"Who may hold it."

"The Seal?"

"The Silver Seal of the Committee." He turned a page. "There is a Schedule of Instruments. It is on the last leaf but two. I have never read it. It is, I believe, extremely dull."

He found it at the foot of a page. It was in six-point type, and there was a great deal of it, concerning the Chamber, and the Key, and the Book, and the periods during which each might be opened. He read down it with his finger. Elen read with him. And at the bottom of the second column, in a short paragraph that began with the number four, he stopped.

The Silver Seal of the Committee shall be kept in the Warded Chamber, and shall be held by the Chair of the Committee in person, and by no deputy; and it shall not leave the Chamber save in his hand.

They read it twice.

"In person," said Elen.

"By no deputy."

"Not Pym."

"Not Mr. Pym. Not a clerk. Not an assistant to the Chair, nor a member of the Committee in his absence." He kept his finger on the line. "It is a thing that one man holds. It has been written so for two hundred years, in order that, if ever it were used wrongly, there should be only one person to ask."

She made a small sound in her throat. It was not quite a laugh.

"That's what Marlow said," said Elen. "A rule is a promise to the weakest member." She drew a breath. "It's the nicest thing a rule's ever done for us."

He took a sheet of paper. He did not rule it. He wrote the heading in his small upright hand, and then, below, in a column, with a numeral in front of each, the things that he knew.

One. A mark upon the person of Mr. K. Pell, bearing within the thread the impression of the Silver Seal of the Standards Committee, as read by a student under a glass, in the presence of the Healer-Mistress and three others, on the sixth of February.

Two. The impression bears a notch in the left pan, matching that on the Chair's own letter of the eighteenth of January, as compared under the same glass.

Three. The Seal may be held by the Chair in person, and by no other.

Four. The Watch Book shows a visit of the Chair, on the twenty-eighth of January, between half past twelve and half past two, not entered by order.

Five. The Healer's day-book shows that on the same night, at the same hour, she was sent out of the ward, and smelled what she smelled, and found the thread brighter at seven minutes past two.

He looked at it.

It was a plain column. It ran to five lines and a bracket. It did not have a heading that anybody would have called remarkable. And it was, he understood, quite possibly the most dangerous piece of paper that he had ever written.

"A chain," said Elen, softly, at his shoulder.

"A chain." He laid down the pen. "Five links. And a chain is as strong as its weakest."

"Which is the weakest?"

"The one that I have not yet written." He drew a clean line under the fifth, and put a six, and left it blank. "There must be three persons in the room at the hour. At present I have the Sergeant, who has said that he will swear. I have the Healer-Mistress, who will be sent out. And I have a cupboard."

"With a hinge that sticks."

"With a hinge that will be oiled." He looked at the blank. "It will be a matter of a very few feet."

She did not say anything. She was looking at the sheet, with her chin on her fist and her eyes on the unwritten line, and her face in the cold light was entirely still.

"I could be in the cupboard," said Elen. "I know I said I wouldn't."

"Footnote," said Alan.

She stared at him.

He had not decided to say it. It had come up in him like breath. He found that he was quite calm. "I am not being correct," said Alan. "I am being, I do not know the word. I am being the one who is going." He drew a slow breath. "You will be in the reeds with Miss Ashby and Mr. Theo. You will have a card. It is a very good card. It is the only account that can be made from outside. And you will be there, because I should know where you were."

She was silent a long moment. Then something went across her face, and she turned her head, quickly, toward the window.

"That wasn't a footnote," said Elen, in a muffled voice. "That was a bit lovely."

"I was uncertain," said Alan. "I thought it best to ask."

They did the lamps together at dusk.

It was not a thing that either of them had arranged. He had gone out to the Annex steps at a quarter to five, with a book under his arm that he did not mean to read, and found her there already, with the can in one hand and the brown coat buttoned to the chin, looking along the long blue arcade with an expression that he could not read. She did not say anything. She held out the rag. He took it.

They began at Doris.

He turned the key, and then took off the chimney, in that order, and held it while she trimmed the wick. He filled the font to the line. She struck the match. It was quite silent. The little flame stood up round and yellow in the glass, and she said, "Evening, Doris," without looking at him, and he said it too, a half-beat after, and they went on to the next.

They did forty. It took them a quarter of an hour. They went down the long south passage in the gathering dusk, side by side, and said good evening to each, in turn, to Philippa, who sulked, and Old Bertram, who needed coaxing, and Mrs. Abernathy and the Colonel and the Gerald with two tags, and the dusk deepened to indigo above the arches. He heard her humming. It was very faint, and badly out of tune. It was a rolling, swinging, questioning song, with a lift at the end of each line, and he did not know the words and did not need to.

At the library door, they stopped.

The little bent lamp stood on its bracket, leaning a little to one side, and on its iron arm two tin discs turned together in the wind. A question mark, in a hand like a cobweb. And Presently. Elen set down the can. She reached up and took off the chimney, which she was tall enough to do now, if she stood on the toes of her boots, and trimmed the wick with a small deft snip, and struck the match.

"Good evening, Presently," said Elen.

The flame caught. It did not flicker. It burned up straight and round and bright in the green glass, so steadily that she stood back with her mouth a little open.

"It's never done that," she said.

"It has a name," said Alan.

"It's a very silly one."

"It is a good one."

"You think so?"

"I think," said Alan, "that a thing which has been waiting a long time to be called something should be called after the thing that it has been doing." He looked at the flame. "It has been waiting patiently. I should say it has earned it."

She did not answer. She picked up the can. They stood together in the blue dusk, at the end of a long gold row of small flames, in the cold, and for a little while neither of them said anything.

"Elen," said Alan.

"Mm."

"I should like to ask for something."

She turned her head.

"You said, in the Annex. A hat." He kept his voice quite level. "You said that you would give it to me when I asked. I told you that I should like to ask for it presently. I find that it is presently."

Her lips parted.

She looked at him for a moment as if she had not understood. And then she put down the can, very slowly, on the stone, and her hand went to the breast of her coat, and undid the flap, and came out with something in it. She held it up between two fingers.

It was a hat. It was knitted, of wool, in a color that had no name in any language that Alan spoke, somewhere between the shade of a puddle and the shade of an old penny, and it had a bobble on the crown which had at some point in its history become sewn on at an angle, and had been looking vaguely disappointed ever since. It was very warm. It was without question the ugliest object that he had ever seen.

"It's dreadful," said Elen.

"It is."

"I made it in the second week of November. In the dark. I couldn't see the stitches. I was going to give it to you for the Frost Fair, and then I didn't, because it was so awful." Her ears had gone pink. "My mother says a hat should be a promise, and I made it a, I made a very peculiar one."

"I should like it."

"You'll look absurd."

"I have looked absurd before."

"When?"

"In a larder," said Alan. "At two in the morning. In the presence of a jar."

She laughed. It was a startled, delighted sound. She stood on her toes, in the blue light, with one hand on his arm to steady herself, and pulled the awful hat down over his dark hair, firmly, to the tops of his ears. She stood back and looked at him with her head on one side.

He did not move. He felt, quite distinctly, the warmth of it, and the faint smell of wool and lamp oil and mint, and the weight of her gaze.

"Oh," said Elen, very softly.

She did not say anything more. Her eyes were bright. Then, with a small shaky breath, she reached up again and drew the hat off, and folded it in four, and tucked it with great care into the pocket of his coat, over his heart, and patted it flat.

"It's so ugly," said Elen, "that nobody will look at you twice."

"It is warm," said Alan.

"That's what I thought." She smiled at him, and it was a wide, slow, rueful smile, with the dimple at the corner like a small gold coin, and her hand stayed where it was for the length of a breath. "You'll need it. It gets very cold in a cupboard."

"I shall bring it back," said Alan.

"I know," said Elen. "That's why I'm giving it to you."

Healer-Mistress Brandt gave him his orders at eight o'clock, in the dispensary, with the door shut.

It was a small bare room that smelled of camphor and green soap, and she sat at the scrubbed table with her pale shrewd eyes on a clock and her large hands flat on the board. She did not offer him a chair. She told it in a flat unhurried voice, like a woman reading out a recipe for a dish she did not particularly care for.

"The Chair comes at a quarter to one. He's never later than ten minutes. The carriage is silent. I do not know how it is done. It is nothing to do with me." She turned her wrist and looked at it. "I give the boy his last draught at eleven. Water and a pinch of salt. It is only to keep his lips from cracking. At half past twelve the sergeant will say that the Chair wishes to be alone. I shall say that it is my ward. He will say he is sorry. I shall go."

"Madam," said Alan.

"I have been put out of that ward once," said Brandt, "and I obeyed. I have been thinking about it ever since." She lifted her eyes. "I have been a Healer forty years. I have been told where to stand by a great many gentlemen. I am extremely good at looking as though I am doing as I am told."

He waited.

"I shall think of something," said the Healer-Mistress. "I am not at liberty to say what. I would rather you did not know. It is better for the oath." Her broad face did not change. "You have until eleven. You may find that the cupboard is not entirely empty. There will be a blanket. I have put a flask in it. Do not drink it all at once."

"I shall be in it," said Alan, "at eleven."

"Good."

She rose. She stood in front of him, short and square in her gray shawl, with her hands folded over her stomach, and looked at him for what felt a long time. Then she put out one large rough hand and straightened the collar of his coat.

"You are a very careful young man," said Healer-Mistress Brandt.

"I am told so."

"You are about to do an uncareful thing."

"Yes."

"I should like to say that I am proud of you," said Brandt, "and that I do not wish to say it, because it would be unprofessional." She took her hand away. "Go and eat something. Not a bun. A proper meal. You will not have another until morning."

He did not eat.

He went to the dormitory instead, at ten o'clock, with his satchel on his shoulder and the lens in his pocket and a hat the color of a puddle against his heart. He had put in the satchel a notebook, a pencil, a form for a sworn statement in triplicate, drawn up that afternoon and checked four times, a small flask of oil, and a candle-end. He did not think that he would need the candle. He took it because it was a thing that one took.

Pip was sitting on the bottom step.

He had a lantern beside him on the stone, turned down to a bead, and a small paper bag in his lap. He did not get up. He was in his waistcoat with the gold bees, rumpled and round and pale, with his hair on end and his freckles standing out sharply on his nose, and as Alan came down the corridor he lifted his head and looked at him with an expression that had nothing whatever of the Rumor Society in it.

"Don't tell me," said Pip.

"I was not going to."

"I know. That's why I'm saying it. I've decided I'm not going to know." He got to his feet. He held out the bag. "It's a bun. It's got the cinnamon. It's the last one. Don't eat it now. It's for the cupboard."

"How do you know about a cupboard?"

"I don't," said Pip, with dignity. "I'm not neutral. I'm just not informed." His round face was working. "I've got a string, too. Here. I don't know what it's for. It seemed like the sort of thing. If you've got a cupboard, you ought to have a bit of string."

He put it into Alan's hand. It was a short length of ordinary twine, wound on a stick.

Alan stood quite still.

"Pip," said Alan.

"If you're not back by breakfast," said Pip, "I'm telling everyone. I'm telling the whole school. I'll do it in capitals." His voice broke on the last word. He turned away, and wiped his nose on his sleeve, and said, quite loudly, to the wall, "Go on. Go on, then. Before I make a speech."

He went.

He climbed the dark stair with the bag in one hand and the string in the other, past the third landing, and the fourth, and out along the cold passage at the top where the dormitory door stood ajar. He did not go in. He stood a moment on the threshold looking at the long dim room, at the two narrow beds, one of them squared and sharp and the other a ruin, and the window at the end with its curtain a hand's breadth apart. He thought about the hat. He thought about a small cold hand on a rope, and a voice saying Footnote, and a sentence that he had said in a corridor that morning, and had not been sure was correct.

It had been entirely incorrect. It had been the best thing that he had ever said.

He went down again, and out by the east door, into the cold black night, and across the white forecourt toward a low white building with a single lamp over the door. It was twenty minutes to eleven. The sky was clear and hard and full of stars. Somewhere beyond the lawn, a great way off, in a hedge of hawthorn and reed at the end of a narrow dark path, three persons were lying on their stomachs in the frost with a card and a lantern and a sword-stick. He did not look toward them. He had said that he would not.

He felt them, all the same, like a hand held out in the dark.