They cut the wax off the greenhouse door on Wednesday afternoon with a pair of garden shears.

Healer-Mistress Brandt did it. She had not been asked. She came across the garden at two o'clock in her gray shawl with the shears in one fist and a look of settled disapproval, and without a word to anyone, or to the two privates on the path who had been posted there and now had no orders and a great deal of embarrassment, she went down the red-sealed door strip by strip, snip, snip, snip, until the last of the Council's wax lay in a little scarlet heap on the gravel. She kicked it into the leeks. Then she stood back, and Professor Marlow, who had been waiting some yards off with a saucer in his hands, came forward and laid his palm flat against the glass, and said to nobody in particular, "Good afternoon," and went in.

By Thursday morning the tar was gone. Theo had gone at it with turpentine and a chisel and a kind of tearful ferocity, and over what was left, in whitewash, in a neat stern hand that every person in the Academy could have recognized at forty yards, somebody had lettered THE POTIONS CLUB, and underneath, in smaller capitals, (RECONSTITUTED). There was a hyphen in it. Nobody could say where. It was understood to have been put in on principle.

Kieran Pell sat on the Annex steps.

He had been told to rest. He had been told it by the Healer-Mistress, who had given him a list; by the Warden, who had sent him an official order, countersigned; and by Elen, who had wept on him for the better part of Wednesday and extracted a promise. He had obeyed all three to the letter by sitting in a blanket on the top step at a quarter to five each evening with his long bare feet in a pair of enormous borrowed slippers, and supervising. "You're doing the Colonel wrong," he told Alan on Thursday, through a mouthful of bun. "You're being too respectful. He likes to be told off."

"I was informed that he was obstinate."

"He's a martyr to drafts. It's a different thing." He tilted his head. His crooked kind face was thin, and the color had not yet come back into it, but it was alight. "You've a good voice for it, you know. When you're not trying. It goes down at the end. They like that."

Alan did not know what to say. He had stood on a good many steps in his life and been praised for a good many things, and never once for the cadence of his good evenings to a lamp. He said, with great gravity, "Thank you," and turned the key before he took off the chimney, and Kieran, on the step, watched him do it, and nodded slowly, like a master at an apprentice's first clean dovetail.

The Winter Trials were held on the Friday.

They came and went as such things do, in a long gray morning of scratching pens and ticking clocks. He sat the Old Court paper in the Great Hall, in the very place where a stool had stood on two successive mornings, and found that he could not recall a single question. He remembered the sunlight on the boards. He remembered that Elen, in the third row of the Potions practical on the other side of the partition, had been given a cauldron by the Examiners, and had looked at it with disdain, and had been permitted, on a note from Professor Marlow reading in his own vague hand, Let her have Margaret, to send for her own. It had taken four people to carry it. It had been, by general agreement, the best-behaved cauldron in the history of the Academy. It had not exploded at all.

The results were pinned up at four. He was told, afterward, that he had come first in his year. He found that he did not much mind who had come second.

The slip was under the handle of the can.

He saw it as he came round the end of the south arcade at ten minutes to five, in the blue half-dark, with the cold on his face and a satchel on his shoulder that had never before been so heavy. The can stood on the Annex step, in its place, with its rag across it. Kieran was not there. There was a gray square of paper beneath the handle, in a quick loose hand that sloped steeply uphill, and as he bent to it he found that his own fingers were not at all steady.

Five o'clock. Annex. Bring everything. (Water.)

He read it twice. He put it in his breast pocket, beside a creased card and a hat the color of a puddle. And he looked up, because a small sound had come from the top of the steps, and saw that the tall loose figure in the blanket had risen from its seat and was making its way, with immense and elaborate dignity, toward the door.

"I've just remembered an appointment," said Kieran Pell, to the sky.

"Kieran," said Alan.

"With a bun." He did not turn his head. He was walking, if that was the word, in a series of slow flapping steps, with the blanket trailing. "A very important one. I'd be most obliged if nobody asked me which bun." At the door, he paused. "Percy! I need you."

A small round shape detached itself from the shadow of a pillar. It had been there, apparently, for some time. "Which bun?" said Percy Tuck, with interest.

"A theoretical one."

"Oh," said Percy. He considered this. "I like those best." And the two of them went in, the tall one leaning on the short one, and the door shut behind them, and he heard, a moment later, from the other side of it, a smothered and unmistakable gurgle of laughter that was not at all that of a person who was resting.

She came round the corner at five.

She was not late. He noted it, with the part of his mind that still kept a ledger, and was ashamed of it, and noted that, too. She came down the arcade in her patched brown coat with her hair in its usual state of struggle and her face pink with the cold, and a small tin can in her left hand, which was not the can that stood on the step. She had made a second. She had made it, he saw, out of a biscuit tin, and soldered a spout to it.

"I thought we'd need two," said Elen. "It's quicker."

"It is," said Alan.

"Honestly, I don't know what you think I've been doing for a fortnight. I've been doing forty lamps with one can."

"I believed that you preferred it."

"I did," said Elen. "I do. It's very peaceful." She stopped in front of him, with the biscuit-tin can held in both hands against her coat, looking up. "I've been peaceful for ages. I'm finding it terribly tiring."

He could not help it. He smiled. It was a small and entirely involuntary thing, and her eyes went to it, and widened, and the dimple came and went in her left cheek like a light in a window.

"Right," said Elen. "Lamps."

They did them side by side.

It was the third time, and he knew the order of it by heart. He turned the key, and she trimmed the wick; he held the chimney, and she struck the match. They said it to Doris. They said it to Philippa, who sulked, and Old Bertram, who needed coaxing, and Mrs. Abernathy and the Colonel, who was told off, with an exaggerated sternness that made Elen splutter, and the two Geralds, and the lamp that leaned. The sky went from blue to indigo above the arches. The forty small flames came on along the passage one after another like a string of beads drawn through the dusk, and the cold deepened, and the snow, which had held off all day, hung in the air above the courtyard like a thing that was thinking.

He did not say anything for the first thirty-eight.

He had meant to. He had said the first sentence over to himself a hundred times, on the walk, in the Hall, in the dormitory, in the lamplit quiet of the Old Court paper. It had a beginning and a middle and an end. It had been in order. And the nearer he came to the end of the passage, with the warm gold light on her face and her breath going up like smoke and her small ink-stained hand lifting the chimney of the Colonel's lamp, the more completely it had gone out of his head, until by the time they stopped at the library door, at the last of the forty, he stood with nothing at all.

"Alan," said Elen.

"Yes."

"You've stopped."

He had. He was standing in front of the little bent lamp on its bracket, with the tin discs turning together at its iron arm, the question mark and the other, and he had the key in one hand and could not remember what it was for.

"I have a sentence," said Alan.

She went quite still.

"It has been owing," he said, "since the lake. I told you that I should say it entire. I told you that it should be after the Trials. I find that it is after them." He drew a breath. "I had it in order. I find that it has gone."

"I know how it ends," said Elen, very low.

"I know that you do."

"It's all right if you say it wrong."

"I should like to say it," said Alan, "in the proper order."

"Footnote?"

"Not yet."

She laughed. It came out startled and bright, and she put her hand over her mouth and her eyes brimmed over it. "Not yet. Oh, that's, you've got a, you've got a whole system." She lowered the hand. "All right. Not yet. Go on."

He set down the key on the step. He unslung the satchel. It was heavy, and the strap had cut into his shoulder, and he opened the flap with fingers that did not seem to belong to him, and took out of it a small packet, wrapped in brown paper, and tied with a length of ordinary twine wound on a stick.

She looked at it. "Is that Pip's string?"

"It was a loan. I believe that it has done its work." He held it out. "You said that you wished to have all of them."

She did not take it at once.

She stood looking at the packet with her lips parted. It was not large. It lay on his palm in the lamplight like a very small, very plain, very grave animal. And then, with a slow, careful, incredulous gesture, she set down the biscuit-tin can on the step, and took it in both hands, and held it against her coat.

"Eight," said Elen.

"Eight. And the two that you have. That is the whole number."

"You said some were burned."

"I said that I had written ten. I did not say that I had kept them all in order." He heard his own voice, a little thick. "There was one that I wrote on the night of the first of October. I do not think that it survives. It began, I regret to say, with the word Whereas."

She made a sound that was almost a sob and almost a shriek, and sat down on the Annex step, quite suddenly, with the packet in her lap. She undid the string. She did it slowly, with her tongue between her teeth. The brown paper fell open. There were eight folded sheets of rough gray Annex stock, soft with handling, and she lifted the first, and unfolded it, and read.

"'Dear Miss Joy,'" read Elen.

Her voice cracked. She went on.

"'I write to inform you that I have no intention of writing this letter. It will not be sent. It is only a means of ordering certain observations which I find, to my considerable annoyance, will not stay in the place that I have assigned them. I have, in the last three days, observed the following. One. That you are late. Two. That you are late in a manner which does not appear to cause you distress. Three. That a person who is late in that manner is, nevertheless, always, upon arrival, precisely where she is wanted.'" She stopped. She pressed her fingers to her mouth. "'Four. That I do not understand this. I shall endeavor to correct it. Yours,'" and her voice dropped, "'A. Valemont.' And then it's, you've crossed it out. And you've put, 'Yours.' And crossed that out. And, oh. 'Yours.' And that's crossed out. And then there's just a, there's a blot."

"I ran out of nerve," said Alan. "It is the only entry in the series that I consider entirely accurate."

She was laughing. She was laughing and crying, with the letter held to her chest, rocking a little on the cold stone step, and he stood above her with his hands empty and did not know what to do with them.

"Sit down," said Elen, thickly. "You're enormous. You're blocking the lamp."

He sat.

It was a narrow step. It had held the two of them once before, and a loose-limbed boy in a blanket, and a good many weeks of sorrow, and he sat on it beside her with his knees drawn up and his arms round them in the blue cold, and the lamp called Presently burning over their heads in its green glass. It did not flicker. It stood straight and round and clear, and the light lay on the page in her lap, and on her hair.

"There's a drawing," said Elen, after a while.

He went still.

"In the back of the notebook. The Observations. You gave it to me, in December. I read it all." She did not look at him. She was turning the letter in her fingers. "I read the page at the back. The one that's folded. It's a girl. She's about seven or eight. She's got a lot of hair, and a dimple, and her mouth is wide open, and underneath you've written two letters and three words." Her voice shook a little. "N.N. She shouted."

"Yes."

"Was that me?"

"I believe so," said Alan. "I did not know. I did not know for a very long time. The evidence is, I should say, considerable."

She snorted. It was a damp, helpless sound, but her shoulders loosened. "The evidence."

"I am assembling a case. I shall present it in due course. It involves a shed."

"You said you'd tell me when it could be a thing to laugh at."

"I did."

"Is it?"

"Not yet," said Alan. "It requires a storm."

She looked at him then. She looked at him sidelong, with her cheek against her knee, and her eyes in the lamplight were very large and dark and quite steady, and he saw a question in them, and knew exactly what it was before she asked.

"Did you love her?" said Elen.

It was a small voice.

"The girl in the shed. The one who shouted. For eight years you had a, you drew her. You wrote to her. You said you'd found her." She wet her lips. "I need to know. I'm sorry. It isn't fair. But if it's her, if it's the one who shouted, and I'm only someone who, who happened to be her, I need to know that before you say anything else."

He did not answer at once.

He sat with the great gold quiet of the arcade around him, and the snow thinking overhead, and the lamps. He thought that it was the most honest question that anyone had ever asked him. He thought that he had had the answer, in order, in three paragraphs, for a week. And he found that he could not give it in order at all, and that the thing which came instead was a great deal smaller, and a great deal worse arranged, and entirely true.

"I do not think that I did," said Alan.

She stopped breathing.

"I should like to say this very carefully. I have been trying to find a way." He drew a slow breath. "I loved what she did. I was nine. I was in a cold place, with a large number of expectations on me, and a girl whom I had never seen before came into it and shouted. At the top of her voice. At nobody. For no reason, at all. And it was the most extraordinary sound that I had ever heard. It had no form. It asked nothing." His voice caught. "I have loved it for eight years. I built a person on it. I made her very good, and very quiet, and entirely mine, and I wrote to her, and I kept her where nothing could touch her."

Elen had not moved.

"I did not love her," said Alan. "I did not know her. I think that is the whole of what I did not understand. You cannot love a person whom you have invented. You can only be fond of a piece of furniture." He lifted his eyes. "And then you came into the Great Hall with your hat on backward, and you were nothing in the world like her."

"I wasn't?"

"She never said sorry to a door," said Alan. "She never had ink on her thumb. She never made a hat in the dark, and could not give it to me, because it was awful. She did not stand on a fountain in front of four hundred people and make birds out of snow. She did not say good evening to forty lamps. She did not hum a song about a lighthouse in the wrong key." He was speaking quickly now, and not in any order, and he let it. "She did not say right then, as though the world were a thing that could be started. She shouted. I have been trying, since October, to be less disappointed that you did more."

"Disappointed," whispered Elen.

"I was not. I find that I was never. I was only, I do not know the word. Relieved." He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, and took them down. "She was a memory. You are the one who is here. It would be a very poor thing, to love a memory, when there is somebody standing in front of one who will not stay still."

The lamp burned. The snow had begun, so lightly that he did not at first believe it, to come down.

"I should like to answer the question that you asked me," said Alan. "On the twenty-second of December. At the foot of a stair. You asked what I loved. I said that I should tell you. I said it after the Trials. I did not know that I would have so many things."

"Tell me," said Elen.

"I love that you are late."

Her lips parted.

"I want to begin there, because it was the thing that I minded most, in October, and I should like it recorded that I was wrong. You are late as a river is late. You are late because you saw something on the way." He swallowed. "I love the ink on your thumb. I love that you say good evening to lamps, and that you have never once been embarrassed by it. I love that you hum, very badly, a song whose words you do not know, with great conviction, and that I have heard it from a mile off, on a lawn, in a snowstorm, and known whose it was."

She had put her hand over her mouth.

"I love that you said it was not poison. To four hundred persons. With your fists shut. I did not know what to do with my hands." He was not looking at her, now. He was looking at the little tin disc on the lamp. "I love that you take your own part. I did not know that one could. I have been taught for seventeen years to put the rule first and my own self a long way behind it, and you came and stood in the middle of a hall and said, we did break them, and I'm not sorry, and I would do it again. And I thought, that is what a person looks like. That is what it looks like when one is whole."

"Alan," whispered Elen.

"I am not finished. I am sorry. It is out of order." He drew breath. "I was afraid, all my life, that if I were not what my father made, there was nothing underneath. I thought that I was a, a very well-kept house, with no one in it. And I stood in a cupboard on Tuesday with a hat in my pocket and a Healer's elbow in my ribs, and I thought: there is somebody in here. And he is standing in the dark. And he is not saying anything." His voice shook. "And he is extremely happy."

A tear went down her cheek and fell on the letter.

"I believe," said Alan, "that what I love is."

He stopped. He had said it exactly. It was the seventh letter. It was a sentence that had stood in a gray page for three months with no end, and he had it now. He had it in his mouth. He looked up. He looked at her, at last, in the green light of the lamp, with the snow in her hair and her face wet and her eyes enormous, and for the space of a heartbeat the whole of his training and the whole of his life stood aside from the thing like a crowd from a door.

"A person," said Alan. "Elen Joy. Who is late, and is not sorry, and is a good deal more than I have words for in either court."

She did not say anything. She sat on the step with her hands pressed to her face, and her shoulders shook, and a small cracked sound came out between her fingers. He put out his hand. He did not know what he meant to do with it. It rested, in the end, on the stone between them, palm up, and after a moment her own came down out of the air and lay in it, wet and cold and very small.

"And if I'd been," said Elen. She stopped. She tried again. "If I'd been a little less."

He knew it at once. It was the only thing that remained. It sat in the air between them in the falling snow, very quiet, like a bird that has been a long time on a wire.

"If you had been a little less," said Alan, "I should rather you had been a great deal more."

She went absolutely still.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "That was not clear. I mean, I should rather it were more. I should like to be a person who says it. All my life, if you will permit. When you are tired, and when you are late, and when you have lost your hat, and are in a state. I should like to be the one who says more." He drew a ragged breath. "I do not think that I can promise to be correct. I can promise that. It is the only thing that I know how to give you that is not a form."

Elen made a sound.

It was one that he had never heard. It came out of the very middle of her, enormous and cracked and helpless, like something being let out of a cage, and she bent over their joined hands with her forehead on his knuckles and wept as he had never seen a person weep, without any shame, in great whole shuddering sobs. He sat with his other hand on her hair. He said nothing at all. He found, to his astonishment, that he had nothing left that wanted saying. It was all there, on the step, between them, in the green light. And a very long time went by.

"My mother," said Elen, at last, into his hand, in a voice thick with tears, "says that a closed door is only a question with a lock on it."

"I recall."

"I've been, I wanted to say it before. I couldn't find the place." She lifted her head. Her face was a ruin of salt and cold and radiance. She wiped it with the heel of her free hand. "I'm unlocking it."

She reached into her coat.

It was the gray card. It came out soft and creased in a dozen places, with its watering can at the top and the lines written down it in her quick uphill hand, and she held it up under the lamp. He read it. He read the lines that said Wait. (Water.) And 11. Tell the truth, in order. Properly. And I miss the second bowl. And, near the foot, in small neat pencil, two words and a stop, and two more.

Noted. Not closed.

She took out the stub of pencil from behind her ear.

She drew a line. It was a small, firm, straight one, through the word Not, and she did it with her tongue between her teeth and her eyes on the card. Then she wrote after it, in letters that sloped sharply uphill and were quite perfectly legible, a single word.

Closed.

She held it up for him to see.

Noted. Closed.

"I forgive you," said Elen. "I'd like it to be on the record that I said it. I don't think I could have, before. I needed you to say the whole thing." She sniffed. "It isn't because you said the nice bit. It's because you said the bad one, first, about the shed. You didn't lie. You could have said you loved her, and me, all in one."

"I could not."

"I know." She laughed, wetly. "That's it. That's why."

She put the card away. She did not seem to know what to do with her hands. They fluttered a moment, and settled, and one of them found the sleeve of his coat and held it.

"There was another thing," said Elen.

"There is generally another thing."

"The four rules." She looked at him. "In the notebook. Do not look. Do not ask. Do not hope. Do not let her do it alone."

"You have read them."

"I read everything," said Elen. "I'm an exceptionally nosy person. How many have you kept?"

He considered it.

He considered it quite seriously, with his eyes on the falling snow, as he considered everything. "I broke the first in October," he said. "I looked. I have looked every day since, with, I am told, very little subtlety. I broke the second on the fifth of February, in a library, when I asked a girl what she had heard. It is the best thing that I have ever done." He drew breath. "The third I have broken this evening. I have said it aloud. I have hoped. I do not know why it took me so long."

"And the fourth?"

"Do not let her do it alone." He turned his hand over under hers, and closed it. "I intend to keep it. For the rest of my life, if I am permitted. It is the only one that I mean to keep."

She was looking at him with her whole face.

The lamp burned over them. The snow had settled in her hair and on her lashes and on the shoulders of the brown coat, and she did not brush it away. She was quite close. He could see the faint freckle at the corner of her mouth, and the blue shadow of the cold under each eye, and the small bright pulse that beat in the hollow of her throat. He had not known that a person could be looked at so closely and not be afraid.

"Elen," said Alan.

"Yes."

"May I?"

She did not ask what. She did not look away. She said, in a whisper, so low that it was almost not a sound, "It's allowed."

"I should like to say," said Alan, "that I propose, in the strictest sense, and with the fullest regard for the limits of what has been agreed, and subject to any, to any amendment which you may wish to."

"Footnote," said Elen.

He stopped.

It went through him like warm water. He heard it, in the quiet, in the green light, in her small cracked voice with the laugh just under it, and he stood quite still, and saw himself, as in a glass, with his hands raised in the air in the middle of a sentence that had no purpose but to put off a thing that he wanted more than he had ever wanted anything. And he laughed. It came up out of him in a short, astonished, helpless breath, and she was laughing too, with her forehead against his shoulder, and the snow coming down on both of them.

"That was a footnote," said Alan, unsteadily.

"That was a very good one," said Elen. "That was the best one I've ever heard."

She lifted her head.

She did not say anything more. She put up her hand, cold and small and ink-stained, and laid it against his cheek, and he felt that it was trembling. He bent his head. It was the simplest thing in the world. It was a thing that he had not rehearsed. Her lips were cold, and tasted faintly of snow and paraffin, and her nose was colder than her lips, and for the space of one breath the whole of the enormous gold-lit dusk, the forty small flames, the falling white, the stone beneath him, the great black arch of the sky, went perfectly still, and then very bright, and then went out of his mind altogether.

It was brief. It was entirely proper. It was, by any measure that he knew, a good deal too short.

He drew back, and she was looking at him with her eyes shut, and her mouth a little open, and a single tear going down her cheek into the corner of a smile, and he found that his hand was in her hair and had no recollection of how it came there.

And the bell rang.

It was not the hour. It was seventeen minutes past five. It was the great black bell in the west tower, which had not been tolled by hand since the autumn and which no rope in the Academy was within forty feet of, and it spoke, once, in the whole width of the winter sky, with a voice so deep and so golden that the snow stopped falling in the air to listen. It rolled out over the roofs. It went down the arcades. It shook the dust out of the beams, and set the forty small flames bowing along the passage, and came to rest, at last, a long way off, among the black far trees of the forest. Windows opened. Along the whole north range, one after another, heads came out into the cold.

Elen opened her eyes.

"Oh," she said. And then she began to laugh. She laughed until she had to put her hands on his arms to hold herself up, bright and wild and cracked, with the tears running into her collar, and from a long way off, faint and thin and exasperated, borne on the windless dark, they heard a very old voice crying, "Odd! It's not the hour! It's not the, I'm writing to the Board!"

"It's rung twice," gasped Elen. "It's rung twice, this month. It rang when you didn't say it, and it rang when you did. It's, it's rung when you were frightened, and now it's." She could not finish. She leaned her forehead against his chest. "Alan. It rang because you were happy."

"I am informed that it is the first time in thirty years," said Alan, gravely, "that it has done so."

"It's got very good judgment."

"I have always thought so."

She looked up at him.

She was smiling. It was a wide, slow, helpless, crooked smile, with the dimple at the corner of her mouth like a small gold coin, and it was, he understood, the whole of one. It was the first that he had been given. He received it as one receives a thing that one has not earned and has no intention, ever again, of refusing.

"Give me the hat," said Elen.

He felt in his pocket. He drew it out, folded in four, with its bobble sewn on at an angle and its look of a thing that has been a good deal through. She took it. She shook it out, and looked at it, and her lips twitched.

"It's been in a cupboard," she said.

"It has."

"It was under a Healer."

"For some part of the time."

"I think it should go back to you." She put it into his hands and closed his fingers on it. "It's got a history now. It can't go back in a drawer. Keep it. Wear it. Be ridiculous." She looked at the green scarf at his throat, and her eyes softened. "And that."

"I said that I would return it," said Alan, "when it was no longer cold."

"It's February."

"There are rooms."

"There are," said Elen, "a very great number of rooms." She tucked the end of the scarf under his collar with two fingers. "Keep it till it's not cold. I'll tell you when. I've decided that I'm in charge of weather."

He took the pen from his pocket.

He did not decide to. It was his grandfather's, and it had been in his hand through a great many things, and he drew from the satchel a clean strip of gray card, and uncapped it. She watched. He wrote in his small upright hand, with the card against his knee, and when it was done he did not hold it out. He only got up, and stood on the step, and reached up to the bracket of the little bent lamp, and tied it to the iron arm with a loop of the green twine, beside the question mark and the word Presently, where the three of them turned together in the light.

"What is it?" said Elen.

"It is an old matter. On Lantern Night, in June, I did not complete a line."

She came and stood beside him, and read it, with her head tipped back.

Set down: being correct instead of present.

Picked up: Elen.

She read it twice. She stood quite still. And then she put out one finger, and touched the card, very lightly, so that it swung on its loop.

"That's a footnote," said Elen, in a very small voice.

"It is the only one that I have ever been proud of."

"I heard the bell!"

It came from the dark of the arcade, high and cracked and wildly excited, and a door banged. There was a scurry of feet on the flags. A short round figure shot out of the shadows at the end of the south passage with his waistcoat flying open and his hair on end, followed more slowly, at a loose flapping lope, by a very tall one in a blanket and a pair of gigantic slippers, and behind them, with her sword-stick under her arm and her face a study in elaborate unconcern, by a tall dark girl whose braid had come down.

"I heard the bell!" cried Pip. "I want it known that I am not neutral! I have never been neutral! I have been in the third-floor corridor with my ear to a door since a quarter past four!" He skidded to a stop, scarlet and panting. "Did it happen? Did it? I'm not asking! I only want to know whether to say it in capitals."

"You may say anything you like," said Elen. She was blushing to the roots of her hair. "You'll anyway."

"I shall," said Pip, with deep satisfaction. "I'm reopening the Rumor Society. There'll be a first issue by morning. Number Zero. I have the headline. It's, wait, I want you to hear it." He drew himself up. "BELL RINGS ITSELF. ROMANCE SUSPECTED."

"Pip!"

"I'm not saying who."

"You're saying it in the headline!"

"A headline is not a name," said Pip, with dignity. "It's a, it's a hint."

"I have a bun," said Kieran Pell, mildly. He had come up the steps in his blanket and stood looking down at the two of them with his long crooked face quite shining. "A real one. Mira's. It's not theoretical." He held it out. "It's got cinnamon. I thought, on the whole, that it was an occasion."

Wren said nothing. She stood on the bottom step with her arms folded and her sharp dark face quite impassive. But she looked at Alan, and at the girl by his side, and at the little lamp with its three small cards, and the corner of her mouth went up, very slightly, and stayed.

"I owe you a debt of lamp oil," said Wren, to the sky.

"Do you?" said Alan.

"I think it's cancelled." She turned and went away down the arcade with her braid swinging, and he heard her say, quite quietly, to nobody, "I'd like it noted that I knew," and then she was gone.

They did not go in at once.

It was a long while before the Annex steps emptied. They stood in the soft gold dusk and the thickening snow, the six of them, in a loose crowd, and shared Mira's bun, which was too small. Pip told them what he would say in the second issue. Kieran explained, at some length, why the Colonel should be told off. Percy Tuck appeared from nowhere and presented Alan with a small, solemn, formal card on which, in a round careful hand, had been lettered, in capitals: THE LAMP MONITOR IS HEREBY CONFIRMED. P. TUCK, FIRST YEAR. And at last, when the cold had got into their bones and the first of the bells for supper was ringing, they drifted off in ones and twos into the dark, with their voices going away down the passage, until at the foot of the steps there were only two.

Elen slipped her hand into his.

She did it quite naturally, and he held it. They stood under the lamp called Presently, in the falling snow, and looked out at the long gold string of the arcade, and for a little while neither of them said anything. The air was very still. The flakes came down large and slow and silent, settling on the arches, on the rail, on the dark wool of his coat, and it seemed to him that the whole enormous winter was going quiet around them like a house at night.

"You promised me a story," said Elen.

"I did."

"A shed."

"A shed."

"You said when it could be a thing we laughed at." She tipped back her head. A flake settled on her nose, and she crossed her eyes at it, and it melted. "I think it can be now. I think it could be, a bit. I'm in a very good mood."

He looked at the sky.

It was thick and low and the color of a pearl, and it was coming down in earnest. It was going to be a great deal of snow. It had the look, which he had seen only once before, on a late afternoon in the last week of November, over a school and a forest and a great white lawn, of a sky that has made up its mind.

"Presently," said Alan. "I should like to tell it properly. I think that it will want a storm."

"There's one coming." She said it with perfect confidence. "Mother Tansy says. She says her knees have never been wrong."

"Then we shall have to be somewhere that we cannot easily leave."

"Alan Valemont," said Elen. She was smiling up at him, in the gold light, with snow in her lashes. "Are you proposing to maroon me?"

"I am proposing," said Alan, "to tell you a story."

"That's what they all say."

"In the strictest."

"Footnote," said Elen, and kissed him on the cheek, quickly, and ran away down the arcade through the falling snow toward the lights of the Great Hall, with the biscuit-tin can swinging from her hand and her hair streaming, singing, quite badly, out of tune, a song about a woman who had married a lighthouse.

He stood a moment longer under the lamp.

Then he picked up the other can, which was a good deal heavier, and the key, and the satchel, and set the hat the color of a puddle firmly on his head, down over his ears, where it belonged. It was warm. It smelled of wool, and of mint, and of a cupboard. He did not trouble to look at himself in the glass of the library door. He knew exactly how it looked.

He went after her.