Nothing happened for six weeks, and Alan discovered that it was the most demanding thing he had ever attempted.

He had expected it to be restful. He had imagined, in the long gray days of January, that when it was over there would be a great clean silence, like the silence after a bell, and that he would walk about in it with his hands in his pockets, feeling lighter. Instead there were lamps at five. There were the Old Court proofs, which had been neglected for a month and now came back upon him all together, like a flock of small gray birds. There was the Annex table, and across it, at a quarter past four, or at half past, or on one memorable Thursday at ten minutes to five with green dye to the elbow and an expression of vast surprise that it was not yet the hour, a girl who said, "Am I late?" and was told by an extremely patient person that she was not, in any sense that he intended to pursue.

He did not mind. That was the discovery. He sat in the Annex with a treatise on the Old Court subjunctive open in front of him, waiting for forty minutes, and found, somewhere in the middle of the second, that the subjunctive had a plot. It was a very sad plot, full of things that might have been, but it was quite absorbing. When the door banged and a red head came round it, breathless, with a smear of something on its nose and its hat on backward, he looked up from the third conditional with a faint sense of interruption, and then with a sense of something so large and quiet that he had to look down again at the page.

"Sorry," said Elen. "I saw a thing."

"I do not doubt it."

"It was a bird. It had a, it was carrying a very small spoon."

"Then you were right to follow it," said Alan, and turned the page, and she sat down across from him with a look of such complete and suspicious happiness that he did not trust himself to meet her eyes for a quarter of an hour.

The first issue of the Rumor Society appeared on the morning of the twelfth. It was pinned to every door in the Academy, in a round blue hand, in capitals three inches high. BELL RINGS ITSELF, it said. ROMANCE SUSPECTED. And underneath, in smaller print: Our correspondent declines to name the parties. Our correspondent notes only that one of them was seen on Friday evening in a hat.

He wore the hat to breakfast.

He did it without any particular decision. It was the color of a puddle and sat down over his ears and had a bobble sewn on at an angle, and he put it on in the dormitory and walked down the length of the Great Hall in it with his back straight and his satchel on his shoulder, between four hundred people who had fallen entirely silent, and sat down in his usual place and unfolded his napkin. Somebody at the third table began, very faintly, to clap. It was a first-year. It was stopped. He buttered a piece of toast, and at the end of the bench, with a charcoal smudge on his forehead and a face the color of a beetroot, Pip Hollis sat quite rigid with a spoon halfway to his mouth, and a single tear ran down his round freckled nose and dropped into his porridge.

"I did not say a name," said Pip, in a strangled voice.

"You did not."

"I was extremely restrained."

"It was a model of the form," said Alan, and passed him the salt.

Kieran Pell came back to the lamps on the fourteenth. The Healer-Mistress allowed him one hour, by the clock, on condition that he sat. He sat on the Annex step, in the blanket and the enormous slippers, with his long face thin and bright and his hay-colored hair standing on end, and directed. He had taken a view of Alan. He had decided, in the way of a man who has been a long time asleep and is not disposed to waste what remains of the day, that it was a thing that had to be dealt with at once. "Assistant Lamp Monitor," he told Alan, on the first evening, with great seriousness. "Probationary. You'll want to say good evening to Gerald with a bit more warmth. He's been through a lot."

"Which Gerald?"

"The one that isn't Not-That-Gerald." He peered at him. "You really do have an extraordinary talent. You say it like a man laying a wreath."

"I have been told so."

"It's not a criticism. They find it very soothing." He sat back against the pillar with a long exhalation, and shut his eyes, and a slow wide gate-like smile broke over his face. "Mind you. The Colonel's worse. The Colonel's got a grievance."

They had their first quarrel on the twentieth.

It was about a word. They were in the greenhouse, which smelled of mint and wet earth and warm clay, in the long yellow light of an afternoon that had begun, for the first time that year, to hold the faintest note of spring, and Elen was labeling the jars. She had brought forty from the cupboard under the bench, each with a paper tag and a stub of pencil, and she was writing on each in her quick uphill hand, with her tongue between her teeth, while Alan, who had been given the stool, read them over her shoulder.

"'Silverbell,'" read Alan. "'Steeped. One year, one day.'"

"That's what it is."

"The protocol that was filed with the Board," said Alan, "uses the word infused."

"It's the same thing."

"It is not, in law. I have read Section Nine of the Assay Regulations. A steeped preparation is a thing which has been soaked. An infused preparation is a thing which has been steeped and then drawn off. The distinction is, I assure you, extremely material. If the Board were to find a jar in this greenhouse labeled with a different verb from the one that is in the file, it would be entered as a deviation. And it would be remarked on. And I should not wish."

"Footnote," said Elen.

He stopped.

He had not noticed that he was doing it. It had come out of him quite smoothly, a long calm clean line of clause after clause, in the voice of a man reading from a charter, and he stood now with his mouth a little open and the rest of the sentence hanging in the air like a coat on a peg. He felt the old cold small hand take hold of the rope at the back of his neck. He drew a breath. He did what he had learned.

"I was about to explain," said Alan.

"You were about to be right." She did not look round. She was smiling at the jar. "What were you about to be afraid of?"

He thought about it.

He thought honestly, with his hands on his knees, in the golden light, and found it quite near the surface. "I am afraid," said Alan, "that the Board will use a word against you."

"That's better."

"I do not wish for them to have a thing to hold."

"I know you don't." She put down the pencil and turned and looked at him. Her face was pink and solemn and full of light. "Thank you for saying that. I'll change the word. I'll do forty jars again. I'd much rather do forty jars again for that reason than for the other."

"It took four sentences," said Alan.

"It took three. You were quick." She leaned across and tapped him on the nose with the pencil. "You'll be able to do it in two by midsummer. I've got faith."

Pip's drawing came on the first of March.

It came folded in a paper bag that had once held a bun, and it was given to them in the Annex without explanation, at a quarter past four, by a very small person in a waistcoat with gold bees who handed it across the table and fled. It was a charcoal study. It was done on a sheet of rough gray paper, in short bold smudgy strokes, and he looked at it for a long time. There was a stone step, under a lamp. There were two persons on it. One was tall, and sat with his knees drawn up and his arms round them and a hat pulled down over his ears with a bobble at an angle, and his face, which was turned toward the other, was very solemn and quite undefended. The other was small. She had a great cloud of hair, which the artist had made a halo, and her chin was on her knee, and she was laughing. Between them, on the stone, their hands lay side by side. They were not touching. They were an inch apart. But the lines of the two had been drawn so that they were quite plainly going to.

At the bottom, in a round blue hand, was written: Study of Two Persons on a Step. And, smaller, in the corner, a minute pewter frog in a cloak, looking disapproving.

"Oh," said Elen.

She did not say anything else. She took it in both hands. She looked at it with her lips parted, and he saw her eyes fill, and she put it down very carefully on the table, as one sets down a thing that will break.

"We're hanging that up," said Elen. "Over the door. Where everyone can see."

"It is," said Alan, "a very good likeness of the hat."

"It's a very good likeness of everything." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "He's drawn us as we are. He's drawn it as though it was already, as though we were already, oh, he's an awful boy. I'm going to give him a bun."

They hung it over the Annex door that evening, with four pins and Kieran's advice, and the lamp called Doris burned below it. It stayed there for a very long time.

Margaret exploded on the sixth.

It was not a violent affair. It was, by the standards of her previous career, a thing of the most modest and even dignified proportions. She had been brought out of the clock-keeper's cupboard and reinstalled in the greenhouse on the Monday with great ceremony, and a ring of the club standing round her, and Professor Marlow reading a few words from a book of common remedies, and on the Wednesday afternoon, at about twenty past three, in the middle of a perfectly routine decoction of coltsfoot, she gave a single deep apologetic whump and rose gently three inches off her stand and set down again, trailing a small gray cloud of steam. Nobody was hurt. Theo had lost, in the event, only a fringe.

"Excellent," said Professor Marlow, who had been standing at his elbow with a saucer. He examined the cauldron with his head on one side, as a gardener examines a vigorous seedling. "A very clean result. That is, I believe, four and a half."

Theo burst into tears. They were tears of unmixed happiness. "She still loves me," he said, to the rafters. "After everything. She just wanted to be sure that I knew."

"I should think that she is very fond of you," said Marlow, gravely. "It is not a thing that one can say of every cauldron."

The letter from Dame Ottoline Fenn arrived on the fourth. It came by the afternoon post, in a plain brown envelope, with a foreign stamp and a mark upon it that said Forwarded, and then Forwarded again, and then in violet ink, with some asperity, At last. Percy Tuck brought it. He carried it into the Annex in both hands like a sacred relic, and laid it before Alan, and stood back with the air of a man who has done the proper thing and expects to be told so.

"It's got a very odd smell," said Percy. "It smells of a hotel."

He opened it with the little brass knife. It was written in a small, brisk, upright, rapid hand, in black ink, and it ran to a page.

Dear Mr. Valemont,

I have just read your letter of the twenty-eighth of January. It reached me on the nineteenth of February, in a hotel in Antwerp, having traveled by way of three forwarding addresses, one of which, I regret to say, was my dentist. I have been abroad. I should like to make that quite plain. It is not an excuse, and I shall not offer it as one.

My colleague Lady Marchbanks tells me that she advised you to try me, and is, I understand, somewhat ashamed. She is quite right on both counts. I should have taken your brief. I had a prior engagement to a client who was, as it happens, a friend of thirty years' standing. That is not a reason either. I have been thinking about it for a fortnight. I find that I do not like what it says.

I hear that you did without me, and rather well. I have read the account of the hearing of the seventh of February. I read it three times, once for the law, once for the style, and once, I confess, for pleasure. I shall be at the Lady Day Session. I should like to meet the young man who read to the bottom of the page. I have not met one in forty years.

O. Fenn.

He read it twice. He put it down on the table, carefully, and looked at it.

"What does she say?" said Elen.

"She says," said Alan, slowly, "that she did not like what it said about her."

"That's the nicest thing a person in a wig has ever done."

"She does not appear to wear a wig."

"It's a figure of speech. Are you going to answer her?"

"I am going to go and look at a window," said Alan, "for about five minutes. And then I shall answer her in the form."

Granny Hobb's stall was where it had always been, at the foot of the Lantern Stair, in the shadow of the old gray wall, and on the ninth of March, a mild bright cold Saturday with the first of the snowdrops coming up along the verge, she gave them each a pastry that burned the fingers and smelled of cinnamon beyond all reason.

"Extra," said Granny Hobb. She was eighty-one. She was wrapped in three shawls and she held the tongs in a hand that shook, a good deal less than it had in the autumn, and she regarded Alan from under her black bonnet with bright terrible eyes. "You're the one with the hat."

"I am, madam."

"It's a dreadful hat."

"It was made in the dark."

"I can see that." She sniffed. She turned the tongs. And then, with a jerk of her head, she nodded across the road toward the foot of the Stair. "Look at that, then."

He looked.

There was a wall. It ran along the bottom of the Lantern Stair, at the edge of the market, a long low drystone thing of gray rubble that had stood there for as many centuries as the stair itself, and in January a section of it had come down. It had not fallen. It had been taken down, a yard at a time, by two men in gray livery with a crowbar, in search of something under the footings that they had been told might be there. They had not found it. They had gone away. And the market had stood and looked at the gap for a month.

It was mended.

It had been put up again by hands that had not been trained for it. He saw that at once. The stones were laid at odd angles, in the fashion of persons who had only ever seen a wall from the outside, and the whole of the new piece leaned a very little to the left, so that it looked rather like a man who had been taken by surprise. But it was solid. It had mortar. And all along the foot of it, in a ragged line, somebody had planted marigolds.

"Mr. Aldous did the lower course," said Granny Hobb. "He's sixty-one years married, and it's the first thing he ever laid. Tobias Valemont came up from the forge and told him he'd done it all wrong, and then he stayed and did the top." She pursed her mouth. "That professor of yours put in the flowers. In the rain. With his own two hands. I never saw a man so happy in a bed of mud."

"It leans," said Elen.

"It does," said Granny Hobb, with satisfaction. "It's been repaired. Lopsided." She slapped the pastry into a paper bag and held it out. "But it stands. I've been looking at it every morning for a month, and it's not come down once. That's the only thing a wall's got to do."

She did not look at either of them, at that point. She looked at the Stair. But there was a small old dry satisfied smile at the corner of her mouth, and Alan, who had been trained for seventeen years to read the edges of a face, found that he could not read it at all, and that he did not need to.

Mother Tansy was at her own stall. She had her awning up, and her bundles of dried herbs laid out on the trestle in their orderly rows, and she said, when Elen asked, without lifting her gray eyes from a bunch of coltsfoot, that she had had it from the Archivist, who had had it from the Clerk of the Board, that the silverbell would be heard in the spring of next year.

"Next year," said Elen.

"Spring of the third." She tied a knot in the string and bit it. "That's the day. It's in the book. They'll sit in April. It's a full year and a bit."

"Mr. Oswin's hands," said Elen, very low. "And Mrs. Aldous. All ten of them. They've been waiting since, we said it'd be in the spring."

"It will be in the spring," said Mother Tansy. "It's a spring." She looked up. Her seamed gray eyes were mild and quite unconcerned. "We're good at waiting, child. It's most of what we do. I've been waiting for that boy of yours for thirty years, on and off. Do you think a year'll frighten me?"

Elen opened her mouth.

She shut it again. She stood for a moment in the thin March sun, with a paper bag in her fist, looking at an old woman in a shawl the color of lichen, and something went across her face that was very like the thing that he had seen in a shed. It was relief, and sorrow, and an enormous plain acceptance, as of a person who has put down a sack at the end of a long climb.

"Presently," said Elen, softly.

"That's the word," said Mother Tansy.

The letter from his father came on the twentieth.

It was brought by a servant. He knew the man at once, from the long black coat and the pale narrow expressionless face, and the way that he stood in the arcade, quite still, on the flags below the arch of the Annex, with his hands clasped before him and his eyes on nothing. He had stood just so in the hall of the Valemont house for twenty years. He held a cream envelope on a silver salver. He did not speak. He had been sent to wait for an answer, and he waited, like a very well-trained crow.

Alan took it. He broke the seal, a plain black one, with the arms of nine generations pressed into it. It was a single sheet. It was written in a long thin upright hand that he would have known in the dark, and it had no salutation.

I have been informed by the Bureau of Regulation, through a channel which I need not name, that on the night of the sixth of February you entered the east ward of the infirmary of the Academy in contravention of a direct order of the Standards Committee, and remained there in concealment for a period of some hours.

I am further informed that you were subsequently a principal witness in proceedings against the Chair of that Committee, a gentleman who has been known to this family for thirty years.

A Valemont does not break an order. It is not a question of the order. It is a question of what a man is.

You will account for yourself at Midsummer. You will come alone. You will bring no one.

He did not say anything for some time.

He sat on the Annex step with the paper in his hand. It was warm and sunny, and the whole length of the arcade lay along the afternoon with its forty iron brackets in rows, and from somewhere across the court the sound of a small boy practicing a scale on a recorder drifted over the roofs, badly, and was cut off. The servant did not move. And Elen, who had come out of the door behind him with a book under her arm, stopped, and looked at the man on the flags, and at the sheet on his knee, and said nothing at all. She sat down. She did it quite slowly. She did not look at the letter. She put her shoulder against his arm and waited.

"He wishes me to account," said Alan, after a time.

"I can see that."

"I shall draft a reply."

He did it on the spot. He took a sheet from his satchel and his grandfather's pen and wrote it in his small upright hand without stopping, in the old calm form. It was rather good. It began Sir, I have the honor to acknowledge receipt of your communication of the eighteenth instant, and it went on, in four tidy paragraphs, to state the facts of the matter in numbered sequence, with such reasons as it was proper to offer. It was perfectly respectful. It conceded nothing and defended nothing. It was, he thought, exactly the sort of letter that a Valemont would write.

Elen read it over his shoulder.

She read to the end of the first line.

"Footnote," said Elen.

He lowered the pen.

He looked at it. He looked at the line, Sir, I have the honor, and at the long calm unfolding sentence that came after it, and he felt, in the pit of his stomach, a very small cold familiar thing. He knew what it was. He had known it in a tower, in a library, in a cold corridor with a lens in his hand.

"I was not being correct," said Alan. "I was being afraid."

"Of what?"

"That if I say it plainly, he will see that I mean it."

"Yes," said Elen. "That's it. That's the whole of it." She laid her hand over his. "Write it again. Write it like the one you gave me in the Annex. The bad one."

He took a fresh sheet.

He wrote it in a minute. It was six lines. It was not in any particular order, and it had no heading, and when he had finished he read it through, and his hand shook very slightly, and he did not alter a word.

Father. I broke the order. I would do it again. I shall come at Midsummer. I shall bring Miss Joy. Alan.

He blotted it. He folded it once. He sealed it with a plain dot of wax, because he had no other, and held it out to the servant on the flags, who took it from him with a gloved hand, and looked at it, and at him, for the first time, with a faint motion of one eyebrow.

"Is that all, sir?" said the servant.

"That is all."

"I am to say," said the man, "that I was a boy in that house. When your father was a boy. In the year of the great frost." He paused. "I am to say nothing of the sort. But I find that I shall." He bowed, quite low. "Good luck, sir. I think it is a very good letter." And he turned and went away down the arcade, a long black figure on the sunlit stones, and was gone.

"Mr. Valemont," said Elen, in a very small voice.

"Yes."

"I'm coming to Midsummer."

"I know that you are."

"I'm bringing a hat."

"I have never doubted it," said Alan.

The Council sat on Lady Day.

It sat in the Warded Chamber, as it always sat. But on the morning of the twenty-fifth of March, a clear bright cold Monday with a pale blue sky and the wind from the north, the great oak door at the foot of the north stair, the one without a handle, which no student had ever been seen to pass, stood open. It had been opened from within. It stood back against the wall, held by a rubber wedge, with the light of the morning going in at it, and a very small, very gray, very dry person in a gown stood on the threshold with a bunch of heavy keys at her belt and a black stem of wood tipped with silver in her hand.

"By the order of the Archivist," said the Archivist, "and in the absence of any other holder, the Chamber is open to the petitioners, to the persons named in the matters on the paper, and to such members of the Academy as can find a seat." Her pale eyes went from one face to the next. "I should say that there are not many."

There were thirty. They stood along the walls in the circular room with its high gray ceiling and its pillars of dark stone and its floor of black and white marble, in the middle of which, set into the stone, lay a broad ring of pure silver. He had stood in it once. He had stood in it on the nineteenth of January in a warm gray lamplight with a pair of pale kind eyes on him, and he looked at it now, and it was only a ring. It was bright. It was cold. It was about nine feet across. Beside it, at the foot of the pillar, a small iron stand stood empty, and on the wall behind it, from a hook of black iron, nothing hung.

He stood at the back of the room with Elen's hand in his.

They were all there. Marlow was at the front, in his clean waistcoat, with a seedling in a saucer, and beside him sat Healer-Mistress Brandt, with a young woman at her elbow in an apron too large for her whose braid was wound twice round her head and who carried, with an air of fierce and proprietary concentration, a tray of small brown bottles. The sergeant was by the door. He had not been called. He had simply come, in his gray, with his cap in his fist, and stood at attention in the corner with his square face set. And in a high-backed bench against the east wall, small and black and upright, with a stick between her knees and a shawl over her hair and a thin pale boy at her side who could not stop shaking, sat an old woman whom Alan had never seen.

"That's Dara's gran," breathed Elen.

Lord Haldane presided. He sat at the head of the room on a plain chair, with his trumpet across his knees and his dried-apple face intent and fierce, and Madam Quill beside him, with her lorgnette. Between them, on a small marble table, lay a thick stained book bound in a cover that had once been green. It had a cracked spine. It had been taken out of an iron safe in the staff tower on the evening before.

"Eh," said Lord Haldane. "We begin. Where's Voss?"

"He is here, my lord," said the Archivist.

He had come in so quietly that nobody had seen. He was standing at the edge of the silver ring in his long gray coat, with his gloves in his hand and his silver head bowed. He was very thin. He seemed to have shrunk. The great handsome grave mask was gone, and what stood in its place was only a tall old man, rather stooped, with his hands not quite steady, and eyes of a pale clear blue that did not look at anything.

It was done in an hour.

It was not elaborate. Marlow stood and gave the account of a barn in the winter of the great frost, in a dry vague level voice, as a man gives a recipe for a thing he has made a thousand times. He gave the date. He gave the place. He laid the thick green book, with its cracked spine, before the Council, open, at a page crowded to the edge with small brown writing, and a clause, very short, in the margin. The Archivist read it aloud. It was in Old Court, and it was a clause that Alan had read, once, in a warm room with two lamps. The mark is not the harm. The mark is only the signature.

Then the old woman rose.

She did it slowly, with the stick. She was perhaps seventy, no bigger than a child, in a shawl and a black stuff gown, and she stood in the middle of the Chamber with the whole Council looking at her and showed no sign of noticing. She spoke in a low flat Alder Street voice, to the table.

"I'm Dara's grandmother," said the old woman. "I'm not a person who does well in rooms. I'll say it and sit." She planted the stick. "She mended my daughter's hand. Lissa Marren. In a barn, in the great frost, with a bit of thread and some words. It was crushed in a cart. It was all, it was like a bag of nails." Her voice did not alter. "It works still. It plays the fiddle. She plays it Saturdays, at the Crown, in Alder Street. It's a very good hand."

She sat down.

There was a silence in the Chamber. It went on a long time. At the old woman's elbow a thin gray boy in a darned coat had put both his hands over his face, and Alan saw Brandt's large rough hand come across, and take him by the shoulder, and hold on.

"The Council," said Lord Haldane, hoarsely, "will confer."

It did not take long.

The Archivist read the finding. She did it in her flat dry voice, in the middle of the great round room, standing, with the black stem of the Seal in her hand and the morning light on her gray head, and nobody breathed. That the working known as Threadmending was, upon review, of the Second Order and not the Third. That the ruling of the Committee in the winter of the great frost, by which it had been so classed, was in error, and was reversed. That the name of Lissa Marren, healer, be struck from the Register of Persons Censured, and entered in the Register of Healers of this realm, with the date of her birth and the date of her death. And that the Council recorded its regret.

"Regret," said Madam Quill, in her clear dry voice, to the lorgnette. "It is not a word that this Committee has used before. I should like to see how it sits."

"It sits," said Lord Haldane, "rather well." He looked up at the ceiling. He appeared to be waiting for something. He turned his trumpet in his hands. "Hm. Well. That's done." He drew a long breath. "The roof has not come down."

"I did observe," said Madam Quill.

And it was then that a thin high dry voice, from the edge of the silver ring, said, "May I speak?"

Every head turned.

Aldric Voss had lifted his face. He stood quite still, with his hands at his sides, and the light from the door lay on his silver hair. "I resign the Chair," he said. "And my seat on this Council. I should like it written. I have no wish to detain the court." His voice was soft. "I should only like, if I am permitted, to say one thing."

"Say it," said Lord Haldane.

He did not speak at once. His pale eyes went round the room, over the pillars and the black-and-white floor and the thirty faces, and came, at last, to the old man at the front with the seedling in his hands. And what he said, in the end, was very quiet.

"I was afraid," said Voss, "that if one stone came out of the wall, the wall would fall."

Nobody moved.

"I have been afraid of it for thirty years. I built my whole life round it. I put a woman out of the register to keep one stone in, and a boy to sleep to keep another." His mouth twisted. "I have just heard a Council say that it was wrong. In a room. In front of witnesses. It said regret." He drew breath. "And I look up. And the roof has not come down."

It was the simplest thing. It was said without bitterness. There was nothing in it of defiance, or of pleading, or of the hard grave tenderness of a man on a stool in a ring of light. It was only the face of an old man who had put down a heavy thing.

"I should like," said Aldric Voss, "to have been told that thirty years ago." He paused. "I should not have believed it."

He bowed to the Council. He did it from the waist, gravely, and turned, and went out by the great oak door into the sunlit passage, with the sergeant, after a moment's hesitation, falling in a pace behind him, and the sound of his step went away down the stair like a man going slowly down into water.

They found them in the garden.

It was nearly noon, and the whole Academy had come out into the first warmth of the year, in knots and strings, to stand about in the thin yellow light of a March sun. The cold lay in the shadows. The grass along the north walk had begun to show green. And on a stone bench by the wall of the greenhouse, under a bare pear tree in the first thin thread of blossom, sat two old men with a gap between them the width of a hand.

They did not speak.

They sat as men sit who have been a very long time apart and do not know where to begin. One was tall and gray and bent, with silver hair and his gloves in his lap. The other was tall and bent and white, in a clean waistcoat, with a seedling in a saucer on his knee. Between them, on the bench, stood a tin pot and two tin cups, which Healer-Mistress Brandt had set down there without a word and withdrawn.

"Alan," said Elen, in a whisper. "Don't look."

"I am not looking," said Alan, from the shelter of the greenhouse door, where they were standing with the whole of the club behind them in a small crowded ring, peering over each other's shoulders through a fogged pane. "I am observing."

"It's the same thing."

"I have been told that it is a distinction not worth making."

"By whom?"

"By the person I intend to marry," said Alan.

It was out before he had thought. He heard it fall into the warm green air like a stone into a pool, and every head in the greenhouse turned. Elen had gone absolutely rigid. She was scarlet to the roots of her hair. She had her hand, very tight, in his, and her mouth open, and she was staring at him as one stares at a person who has just announced that the sky is a pleasing shade of green.

"I beg your pardon," said Alan. "That was not." He felt the blood climbing his neck. "That was a hypothetical."

"It was not a hypothetical," said Wren, with great clarity, from behind.

"It was not a footnote either," said Mira.

"I would like to say," said Pip, in a high voice, "that I am not taking notes."

"Everyone," said Elen, faintly, "go away."

They did not. But at the bench, in the sun, a tin cup was lifted by a gloved hand, and sniffed, and set down.

"Ambrose," said Aldric Voss. "This is the worst tea that I have ever tasted."

"It has always been the worst," said Professor Marlow. "You drank it for thirty years."

"I drank it at two in the morning. I was not a discriminating man."

"You were a very discriminating man." The old white head turned. It was a very small movement, and the pale vague kind eyes behind the spectacles were fixed upon the other's face. "It is only that you were also very tired."

There was a pause. A thrush was singing in the pear.

"I do not know what to say," said Voss.

"No," said Marlow. "Nor do I. I have been thinking of it for a week." He lifted his own cup. He drank, and made a small face. "You were right, you know. It is dreadful. Drink it anyway."

And after a moment, with a long, slow, uncertain breath, the old man in the gray coat took up his cup again and drank, and the gap between them on the bench was a very little narrower than it had been, and neither of them remarked on it.

"Mr. Valemont."

It was a brisk, light, carrying voice. It came from the foot of the greenhouse steps, and he turned, and saw a person whom he had not seen before.

She was small. She was about sixty-eight, and sharp-featured and brown, like a very vigorous walnut, and she wore a tweed costume of an indescribable color, and sensible boots, and on her head a hat that appeared to have been constructed out of an inverted flowerpot. She carried a man's gold watch on a chain, and a stick with a silver knob, and she was looking at him with a pair of snapping black eyes of an expression of such alert and amused intelligence that he found himself, to his own surprise, standing up very straight.

"Ottoline Fenn," said the lady. "Of the Bar. You wrote me a very good letter and I did not answer it, and I am here to be forgiven. Is there anywhere in this place where a person can sit without being photographed by a clergyman?"

"There is a bench," said Alan, "in the potting shed."

"That sounds right," said Dame Fenn.

It was a tight fit, with the two of them and a barrel of loam, and she sat on the horse-blanket with her stick between her knees and the awful hat tilted back and looked about her with open delight. "I like it," she said. "It's got the proper smell. I've not been in a shed since I was nine. Do you know I was in one then, for a week, with a spaniel, because I'd said a thing to my father?" She shook her head. "Never mind. I came to say two things. The first is that Marchbanks is an old coward and I told her so at breakfast. She sends her love."

"I am obliged to her."

"The second is a thing I do not do. I am sixty-eight years old. I shall retire from the Bar by the time that you are twenty-two." She looked at him sidelong. "I have not had a clerk in nine years. I have been looking, at intervals, for one. I have sat in a great many rooms with a great many young men who were clever, and quick, and correct, and I have sent every one of them away."

"Madam."

"They were all extremely correct. It is a thing the profession breeds. Nobody had read to the bottom of anything. They read the top, and the sides, and they made, I must say, a very handsome case out of them. And I thought, there is nobody in this country who will look at a footnote." She drew a breath. "And then I read an account, in Antwerp, in a hotel, of a boy in a cupboard."

He could not speak.

"The Bar has not had a person who read to the bottom of the page in two hundred years," said Dame Fenn. "I should like it to have one. I am offering you a clerkship, Mr. Valemont. After you graduate. Under me, if I'm alive, and under Marchbanks if I'm not, which would be a poor exchange but the best on offer." She took out the gold watch and looked at it. "I propose you. She will second out of embarrassment. A third will be found. It is, I assure you, the most badly paid employment in the realm."

He sat quite still in the little shed with the golden dust turning in the light from the window.

It was a very large thing. He had known, in a general way, that it might come. He had thought of it in the dark, in a cupboard, as one thinks of a door at the end of a long corridor that one will never open. He had been told for seventeen years where he was going. It was a plain road. It went to the Bureau of Regulation, in a gray building in the city, to a desk, and a coat, and the correct bearing of a man in his position. His father had walked it. His grandfather. It was nine generations long.

"I should like to say yes," said Alan.

"Then say it."

"I should like first," said Alan, "to ask someone."

Dame Fenn put her head on one side.

"I have lately made a rule," said Alan. "It is that I do not decide a thing of this sort alone. I find that it does not turn out well." He swallowed. "I should be obliged if I might have a quarter of an hour."

She looked at him for so long, with her black bright eyes, that he thought he had offended her. Then the whole of her brown face creased up like a walnut, and she gave a short delighted bark of laughter that made the pots ring.

"That is the first sensible thing," said Dame Fenn, "that a young man has said to me in ten years. Take twenty minutes. I shall be here. I shall sit in the dust and annoy the spaniel."

He found her on the greenhouse steps.

She was sitting on the top one with her chin on her knees and her arms round them and the sun on her hair, watching two old men on a bench, and she did not look round as he sat down beside her. He had not known how to begin. He sat for a while, in the quiet, with his hands between his knees, and heard the thrush.

"She wants me for a clerk," said Alan.

"I know. Mira told me. Wren heard it through the wall." She did not turn her head. "What did you say?"

"I said that I should like to ask you."

She went quite still.

"I said that I do not decide a thing alone," said Alan. "I find that I should like very much to say yes. I do not know what it will cost. It is, I believe, the end of a thing that my father has planned since I was seven. It is a wall." He drew a breath. "I do not see how I can go round it."

"It isn't a wall," said Elen.

She turned her head.

Her face was grave and clear and entirely certain, in the thin gold light. "It's a door. It's got a lock on it. I've told you what that is. It's only a question." She put her hand on his. "Do you want it?"

"I do not know that I have ever wanted anything so much, that was not you."

She made a small sound. It was not a laugh. She put her forehead against his shoulder for an instant, and drew it away, with her eyes very bright.

"Then say yes," said Elen. "You'll be marvelous. You'll be the best person who ever stood up in that room and said, 'Excuse me, I've read the footnote.' You'll make them all look at the bottom of the page." She wiped her nose on her sleeve. "And I'll be at the back with a card."

He said yes.

He said it twenty minutes later, in a potting shed, to a brown woman in a flowerpot hat, and she shook his hand with a grip like a vise and told him that he was to write to the Bureau of Regulation in good time and decline nothing. "Keep the cadetship," said Dame Fenn. "Keep it open to the end. Your father is a proud man and a hard one and I knew him slightly, and I should say he has not had a door left ajar for him in forty years." She tapped the silver knob of her stick against the floor. "You'll want to leave him one. You can always close it afterward. It's very much harder to open one that's been shut."

The Annex steps were crowded that evening.

It was a quarter to five and the arcade lay in a long warm gold light with the forty lamps unlit along it, and the whole of the club had come to watch. They sat on the steps and on the wall and on the rim of the dry fountain. Mira had her ledger. Theo had a bun. Dara, very pale, with his eyes red and a very faint curve to his mouth, sat beside his grandmother, who had been persuaded to stay for supper and had said that she would look at the food and decide. Wren stood against a pillar in a gray apron that was a size too large, with a small brown bottle clutched in one hand like a weapon.

"Healer Brandt's taken me on," said Wren, to nobody, to the sky. "As an assistant. I'm to carry things. Until I'm trusted with a pipette." Her voice cracked, very slightly. "She says that she wasn't licensed at my age either. She says licenses come after."

"After what?" said Theo.

"After the work," said Wren. She turned her head away. "I'm not crying. It's the lavender."

And Kieran Pell rose from his blanket on the top step, tall and loose and crooked, with his hay-colored hair on end and a long iron key in his hand on a loop of green string. He stood for a moment with the light on his thin kind face. He looked down at them all. He looked, for rather a long time, at a tall dark boy in a puddle-colored hat and a short red-haired girl with a smear of ink on her thumb, standing side by side at the foot of the steps with their hands very nearly joined.

"Right then," said Kieran.

His voice carried.

"I've been the lamp monitor of this Academy for two years and four months. I've done it every night, bar nineteen, which I'm told I can't be blamed for." There was a ripple. "It's a good job. It's the best one that I've heard of. I'm to be an apprentice, from the autumn, in the Assay Office. Marlow's put in a word." He cleared his throat. "I shall go on doing the lamps. I'd be mad not to. But I think they ought to have somebody here at five who isn't also halfway through a thesis."

He held out the key.

He did not give it to Alan. He did not give it to Elen. He held it out between them, at the full length of his arm, so that it hung in the air in the golden light, a plain old black iron thing on a loop of green twine.

"Lamp Monitors," said Kieran. "Deputy and deputy. Jointly and severally. I'd like it noted that the Colonel is to be told off. I'd like it noted that Gerald is not Not-That-Gerald. And I'd like it noted that the one by the library door," and his voice cracked, quite suddenly, and recovered, "is called Presently. It's the best name that it's ever had."

Elen took it. She took it in both her hands, and held it against her coat, and her eyes overflowed. Alan put his own hand over hers. It was, he saw, quite steady.

"I should also like to say," said Kieran, "that there's a third one."

He turned. At the end of the step, in a muffler that went round him eleven times, and a coat that had at some stage been cut for somebody larger, a small round person had risen to his full height of four and a half feet and stood with his chin up and his face scarlet, holding a little brass lamp.

"Deputy-deputy," said Percy Tuck. "First year. I've been confirmed."

It was received with a roar.

He stood at the foot of the steps with a key in his hand and a girl at his side and a ring of loud, laughing, dear, ridiculous faces round him in the evening light, and could not think of one thing to say. It was the strangest sensation. He did not feel that he had been given anything. He felt, rather, that he had been found. They were lighting the lamps. Somebody began to hum, in the wrong key, a song about a woman who had married a lighthouse, and four or five others took it up, raggedly, and down the long arcade the first small flames came up in the gold, one after another, like beads on a string.

"Good evening, Doris," said Elen.

"Good evening, Doris," said Alan.

They left on the twenty-eighth.

It was an ordinary morning. It was cold, and clear, and rinsed, with a high pale sky and a thin sun and a wind that smelled for the first time of earth. There were snowdrops along the verge of the drive. The coach waited at the great gate, a plain hired two-horse thing, with a driver in a muffler and a roof-rack of battered luggage, and the horses, who had been told to stand, were blowing steam and giving it all their consideration.

The gate-lodge door stood open.

It had been mended, and painted. A square gray man stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, with his cap on the back of his head and a thick black book under his arm. He had a mug of tea. He was, so far as could be discovered, perfectly happy. As the two of them came down the drive together, he straightened, and put the mug on the sill, and saluted.

"Morning, Mr. Valemont. Miss Joy."

"Sergeant," said Alan.

"Not any longer, sir. I'm told it's Gatekeeper. I've the keys, and the book." He patted it. "It's the same sort of book. It's a deal more cheerful." He looked down the drive, where the crowd was coming. "I find that I'd rather be useful than obeyed. It's a better fit."

They had all come.

They stood in a ragged crescent on the gravel in the cold bright air: Mira, with a small neat parcel in brown paper which she pressed upon Elen with a list, Provisions: twelve items; Theo, who wept; Dara, with a folded paper that proved to be a map of the road, drawn in a thin careful hand, with every inn marked and a red cross against two that were not to be trusted; Wren, with her arms folded, who said nothing at all and then, very quickly, stepped forward and gripped Elen's wrist and let it go; Kieran, in a blanket, with Percy at his hip. And at the back, a little apart, in a clean waistcoat, with a saucer in his hands and a mild pale vague smile, stood Professor Marlow.

"A safe journey," said Marlow. "I hope that you will convey my respects to Mrs. Joy. I am given to understand that she has a theory about hats."

"How does he know?" said Elen, in a whisper.

"He hears things," said Alan.

Pip came last.

He came down the drive at a dead run with his waistcoat flying and his hair on end, and a sheaf of paper in his fist, and he skidded to a halt on the gravel, crimson and gasping, and held it up. "Number Two," he said. "Hot off the press. I didn't have time to get it pinned. I wanted you to have the first." He thrust it at them. "I am not neutral. I wish it to be known. I have never been less neutral in my life."

Elen took it. She read it, and began, helplessly, to laugh. It was a single page, in round blue capitals, under a masthead with a small drawing of a bell. LAMP BOY DEPARTS FOR ENGAGEMENT WITH MOTHER, it said. OUTCOME AWAITED WITH INTEREST. Beneath was a small neat paragraph that began, Our correspondent wishes the gentleman luck, and the lady rather more.

"Rather more," said Elen, wiping her eyes.

"I stand by it," said Pip, and burst into tears.

They got in.

It was a plain narrow shabby coach, smelling of straw and old leather, with two seats facing each other and a window on each side, and the driver cracked his whip, and the whole world began to move. He leaned from the window. He saw them all, in the cold bright light, in a long ragged line along the gravel, waving: the tall loose one in the blanket, and the small round one with a lamp, and the dark one in the apron who did not wave but stood with her fist at her breast, and a thin boy with a map, and a round one with a sheaf of paper, flapping it like a flag. They grew small. The long gray front of the Academy went by, with its high windows and its towers, and on the wall of the west tower, very small, a single flash of light that was somebody's window turning in the sun. He heard the great bell strike. It was not the hour. It was a single deep golden note, and it rolled out over the lawn.

"Odd," said Elen, softly, looking out. "It's not the hour."

"I should say," said Alan, "that it is very much the hour."

She turned.

She was sitting on the seat across from him in her patched brown coat, with a paper parcel on her lap and a pewter frog in a green cloak peering out of her pocket and the sun on her face. Her hair was in a rope that was beginning to come down. She had a smear of ink on the thumb that held the parcel. She looked at him, with her head on one side, and the dimple came and went at the corner of her mouth.

"Come here," said Elen.

He moved. It was a small coach, and a narrow seat, and he sat down beside her with his satchel on his knees and the hat down over his ears, and she slipped her hand into his, and laid her head on his shoulder. It was as simple as that. The road ran out in front of them, a long pale thread between green hills with the snowdrops along it, and the wheels went round.

"I have prepared nothing," said Alan.

"I know."

"I have no form. I have no notes. I have not the least idea what your mother will ask. I have not even worked out how to address her."

"Footnote," said Elen, comfortably, with her eyes shut.

He considered it.

He sat in the swaying coach, in the thin spring sun, with the warm weight of a head on his shoulder and a hand in his, and went honestly over what he had said, as he had learned. He felt for the small cold hand on the rope, and found, a little to his surprise, that it was not there.

"I was not being correct," said Alan. "I was being afraid."

"I know," said Elen. She tightened her fingers. "It's all right. Be afraid. I'll be there."

The coach swung round a bend. Beyond the hedge the whole spring land opened out, green and gold and enormous, with a bright blue sky over it and a river like a thread of silver going away in the sun, and somewhere beyond it, a long way off, a small house with a nail by the door.

He had never in his life been so entirely unprepared, nor so entirely unafraid.