The map was drawn on the back of a seed catalogue, in brown ink, with a compass rose in one corner and a small neat note in the other that said: ROAD (PROBABLY).

Alan held it at arm's length and turned it, slowly, through ninety degrees. It had been folded and unfolded so many times that the creases had gone soft as cloth. It showed a crossroads, and a church, and a river that wound in a great loop across the whole sheet like a dropped ribbon, and a small cross with an arrow and the words HOUSE (HERE, I THINK). Between the crossroads and the cross there ran a single dotted line that was marked, at intervals, with remarks. Stile. Don't. Cow. The cow is not a bull but I am told it behaves as one. Bog. And, at the very end, in letters that had been gone over twice, as though their author had been struck by a doubt and then struck by another: POND.

"Your father," said Alan, "has drawn the road to a pond."

"He has."

"I do not see a house."

"There isn't one, on that side. That's the point." Elen was walking beside him down a rutted lane in the thin yellow light of a Saturday afternoon in the last days of March, with a paper parcel under one arm and her coat open and her hair coming down, and she had been talking for forty minutes. She had talked through the crossroads. She had talked through the church, which she said had a very bad angel. She had talked about her mother's bread and her brother's feet and a goat called Pontius, and she had not once, he noted, drawn breath where a sentence ended, which he had come to understand was the thing that she did when she was frightened. "He does it on purpose. Father. He says that if you arrive at the front door by the proper road you've missed the best of the parish. It's a test. If you reach the pond you turn left at the willow and come up through the orchard, and then you've seen the cherry trees. If you go straight you only see the gate."

"And which have we taken?"

"The gate," said Elen. "I'm sorry. I thought, for the first time, it would be nice to be ordinary."

He looked at her.

She was not looking at him. She was looking at the lane, which ran on between high hedges white with blackthorn blossom and loud with small birds toward a bend, and she had gone, in the last minute, quite pale. The talk had stopped. It had simply stopped, as water stops when a tap is turned, and in the quiet he heard the rooks in an elm and the creak of the satchel on his shoulder and the rustle of the paper parcel under her arm.

"Footnote," said Alan.

She stopped dead.

"I am not being correct," he said. "I am being, I believe, observant. You have been talking for forty minutes without a full stop. You do this when you are afraid." He drew a breath. "I have been informed that it is a thing one is permitted to say."

"I'm not afraid," said Elen.

He waited.

"I'm a bit afraid," said Elen. She wrapped both arms round the parcel. "It's not that she'll eat you. She won't. She'll look at you for four seconds and decide, and she's never been wrong about a person in her life, and I've never brought one home." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she laughed, an unsteady little sound. "I've never had to find out what she says."

"I see."

"You don't. You can't. You've been, you're being so good about it. You've had a face like a man going to be shot since Tuesday."

"I have prepared nothing."

"I know."

"I have, in point of fact, prepared three things." He opened the flap of the satchel. "I was reluctant to mention them. I am aware that I stated otherwise."

She stared into it.

It contained, in order, a small round pot of earth with a seedling in it, wrapped in a handkerchief and tied with green twine; a twist of coarse brown paper, with a smell of dried leaves, on which somebody had written in a very faded hand, Tea. For the mother. Not for anyone else; and a brass bookmark about the length of a finger, bent a little to the left, with the crude, unmistakable look of a thing that has been made by a person who was told that it was easy.

"That's Marlow's marigold," said Elen, faintly. "And that's Tansy's. And what's that?"

"I made it," said Alan. "In the Academy forge. In the second week of March. Under the supervision of a person who has the patience of a stone." He heard how it sounded. "It is very poor. I was informed that your mother reads. It seemed a better thing than a form."

She did not say anything.

She stood in the lane with the sun on her face and a hedge full of birds at her back, and looked at the tall dark boy in a puddle-colored hat and a green scarf, in the warm spring afternoon, holding out a crooked brass bookmark in the flat of his hand. And a very slow, brilliant, helpless thing happened to her mouth.

"Alan Valemont," said Elen. "I am going to marry you."

It was out before she could stop it. He saw it go across her face, and her eyes go enormous, and the color come up from her collar to the roots of her hair. She clapped her free hand over her mouth. Above it, her eyes were wild.

"That was a hypothetical," said Elen, through her fingers.

"It was not a hypothetical," said Alan, with great gravity.

"It wasn't a footnote either."

"No." He put the bookmark carefully back in the bag. He closed the flap. He found that his own face was doing something that he could not entirely account for, and he looked up the lane toward the bend, where the blackthorn leaned across the ruts, and said, in a steady voice, "I am obliged to you for the information. I shall retain it. It will be useful, I believe, when I have been interrogated."

She made a squeaking sound, and caught his hand, and they went round the bend together at a rather hurried walk.

The gate was a five-barred affair of gray weathered wood, hung between two stone posts topped with moss, and it stood open on a long untidy garden going away up a slope toward a house. There was a person on it.

He was sitting on the top bar with his boots hooked under the second and his elbows on his knees, swinging gently, in the manner of a man who has been there for the better part of the afternoon and expects to be there for the better part of the evening. He was very large. He was perhaps twenty, and six feet and two inches, with a mop of brown hair that had never been introduced to a comb and a broad, freckled, cheerful, shameless face that was, in every essential feature, a masculine and slightly oversized version of the girl at Alan's side. He wore a waistcoat with two buttons. The rest had evidently been lost in action. He had a straw in his mouth.

"You're late," said the person on the gate. "Mother said four. It's ten past. She's been at the window with a watch."

"We went by the road," said Elen.

"Did you? Father'll be thrilled. He'll want to put it in the Gazetteer." The straw moved. The large bright hazel eyes, which were exactly the color of Elen's, passed over her, and rested on the figure at her elbow with a frank, slow, entirely unembarrassed appraisal, from the top of the puddle-colored hat to the toes of the boots. "So you're the lamp boy."

"I am Alan Valemont," said Alan.

"Brilliant." The straw came out. The large person dropped off the gate with a thump that shook the post, and stood in front of him, a good inch taller, and stuck out a hand like a spade. "Ethan Joy. Six foot of complete nonsense. I've been told so by a variety of authorities. Say turnip."

"Ethan!" cried Elen.

"Go on."

"I beg your pardon?"

"She wrote us eleven pages," said Ethan Joy. He did not lower the hand. "Eleven. About a shed. We've had it read out at dinner every night for a fortnight. Mother cried. Father wanted to know the latitude. I want to hear it." He grinned, and it was an enormous grin, entirely without malice, and Alan found, to his considerable astonishment, that it was not at all alarming. "Say turnip. I was twelve. I shouted for twenty minutes. I've been dining out on that mitten for eight years and I should like, just once, to meet the other end of it."

"You were the voice," said Alan, slowly. "In the snow. 'Elen, come back.'"

"I was."

"You sounded frightened."

"I was extremely frightened," said Ethan, cheerfully. "I thought the snow had eaten her. I'd made it up, you see. I'd said it to shut her up. And then I couldn't find her for an hour and a quarter, and I thought, oh, I've killed my sister with a story." He shook the hand, which Alan had, without his noticing, taken, up and down once, with great vigor. "And then she turned up at the door with one mitten and an expression of total triumph, and said she'd met a boy who couldn't shout. And I thought, thank God. I've not killed her. I've only started something."

He let go.

"Turnip," said Alan.

It was a perfectly even, perfectly grave, perfectly audible turnip, delivered in a clear tone and in the correct key, and Ethan Joy looked at him for a moment with his mouth slightly open. Then he threw back his head and roared. It was a vast rolling shameless peal that sent a flock of starlings out of the hedge, and he leaned on the gatepost and wiped his eyes, and said, in a voice of weak delight, "Oh, she said you would. She said you'd say it exactly like that. Like a man giving evidence."

"I am told that it is a habit."

"It's the best thing I've ever heard," said Ethan. "Come in. Come and meet Doubt. He's been very good. He's only eaten one hat."

Doubt was in the paddock by the gate.

He was a cob, very large, very broad, the color of a wet slate, with a blaze down his face like a streak of spilled milk and a long, mournful, dubious expression, such as one sees on the face of a person who has been told that the soup is fresh. He came over the grass at a ponderous walk, and put his head over the rail, and stopped a foot from Alan's face. He looked at him. He looked at the hat. He drew in a long slow breath through his nostrils with a sound like a bellows.

Alan did not move.

He had been told that one must not show fear. He stood quite still, with his hands at his sides and his heart going fast, and the huge soft nose came forward, and snuffed along the brim of the hat, once, and across the bobble, and stopped.

Doubt sneezed.

It was a tremendous sneeze. It took the puddle-colored hat clean off Alan's head and into the grass, and covered his face and the front of his coat with a fine warm spray, and the cob drew back with an air of extreme reserve and regarded the ruin with, apparently, deep satisfaction.

"That's approval," said Elen, gasping.

"Is it?"

"It's his highest. He sneezed on the vicar for six years." She was bent double, with the parcel clutched to her chest, shaking with laughter. "He only does it to people he's decided to keep."

Alan picked up the hat. He shook it. He put it on again, with great dignity, down over his ears, and a lock of horse-hair, which he did not remark upon, stuck out from under the brim. "I am honored," he said, to the horse. The horse blew out his lips.

"You've come by the road!"

It came from behind the hawthorn, a high excited cracked voice, and they turned, and saw a hedge shake. A long lean ragged figure came through it backward, with a thorn-bough in its hair, and turned round. It was a man of fifty-five, tall and stooping, with a long brown crumpled amiable face and spectacles pushed up on a forehead which gave the impression of having been thought about a great deal. He had a theodolite under one arm. He was holding a map. It was, Alan saw, the twin of the one in his own pocket, and the wrong way up.

"The road!" said Mr. Joy again, in tones of rapture. "Wonderful. Nobody uses the road. I have been waiting for someone to try it since the year the parish was surveyed. Hugo Joy. Delighted. You'll be the, you must be the, my dear boy, what's your name?"

"Alan Valemont, sir."

"Alan Valemont. Yes, yes. A very good name, it has a good bearing. It has the sound of a place where a river bends." He pumped Alan's hand. His own was long and dry and covered in ink. "I do beg your pardon about the map. It's unfinished. I intended to put a sign at the gate, and then I thought, no, they'll go by the willow like everyone else, and I'd got the Pond very nicely done."

"It is an extremely clear Pond."

"Is it?" said Mr. Joy, and his whole face lit. "Did you hear that, Ethan? He says the Pond is clear." He peered about him, at the lane, the paddock, the sky, the empty air at his elbow, with the bewildered benevolence of a man who has set down his own house somewhere and cannot at once recall where. "Where are we? I had it a moment ago. It's the orchard, I think. I'll go and see."

He set off up the garden, with great purpose, in the direction of the hen-house, and Ethan said, without turning his head, "He'll come out of the cowshed in about two minutes. Don't wait."

"He is not lost," said Elen, proudly. "He's exploring."

The house stood at the top of the slope, among a cluster of old trees. It was long, and low, and lopsided, a rambling thing of rose-colored brick and honey-colored stone with a roof of mossy slates and a great many chimneys, and it looked, he thought, as though it had grown there in a single warm afternoon three hundred years ago and been added to ever since by persons of cheerful temperament who had not consulted one another. There were books in the windows. He could see them from the garden, stacked on the sills, leaning against the glass, piled so high in the one nearest the door that the light could scarcely get past. A stone path went up between beds of daffodils. At the end of it stood a porch, with a latticework of bare wisteria, and a green door, standing half open, and in the door, a nail.

It was an ordinary nail. It had been driven into the lintel beside the frame at about the height of a child, a good while ago, and had rusted a little, and a number of things had at various times been hung from it. There was a bunch of keys. There was a dog's lead. There was a very small child's knitted cap, faded to the color of oatmeal. And beside the umbrellas, on a loop of green twine, quite alone, with its thumb a little crooked and a darn in it of a slightly different red, there hung a mitten.

Elen stopped on the path.

She stood with her back to the house and the parcel in her arms, and did not move, and it came to him, as he stood beside her with the horse-hair in his hat and the daffodils nodding at his boots, that she had not been home since Christmas. She had not been home since the shed. She had been told, on a bright cold morning in a potting shed, that the other one had hung there for eight years, and she had put it in her pocket in a tin, and taken it a hundred and fifty miles in a coach on her knee, and now she was twenty feet from the nail, and could not take another step.

"It's exactly the same," said Elen, in a very small voice.

"Yes."

"I walked past it every day. I never looked." She drew a ragged breath. "I thought it was just, I thought it was a thing Mother couldn't throw away."

"It was a promise," said Alan.

She did not look round. But her hand came out behind her, and found his, and held on.

"Will you come?" said Elen.

"I am here."

They went up the path together.

She took the mint tin out of her coat at the porch. It was a small flat thing, a little dented, with a faded picture of a lighthouse on the lid. She opened it. On its bed of folded tissue, faded to the color of an old rose, with a darn at the thumb and a tiny upright stitch at the cuff, lay a small red wool mitten. She lifted it out with two fingers, as if it might wake. She turned it over once, in the afternoon light, and her lip trembled. Then she reached up, on her toes, to the lintel, and found the loop of green twine that held the other, and laid the second beside it on the nail.

They hung together.

It was the simplest thing in the world. The two small red mittens, left and right, a little shrunk, a little worn, in two slightly different shades of faded rose, hung side by side from a rusty nail in a draught beside a bunch of keys, and the one swung gently, in the breeze from the open door, and touched the other, and was still. They were a pair. They had been, for eight years and a hundred and fifty miles, the left and the right of a single thing, and he stood in the porch with his hand in a girl's and looked at them, and did not say anything at all.

"Oh," said a voice from the door.

It was a low voice. It was not loud. It had in it a good deal of floury warmth and a certain dryness underneath, like the crust of a very good loaf, and it was not at all surprised.

"There," said the voice. "Now it's done."

They both turned.

A woman stood in the doorway. She was short, and round, and about fifty, with a lined brown shrewd face and a great deal of hair, which had been brown and was now gray in a broad streak from the temple, wound up on the top of her head and skewered with two pencils and a knitting needle. She wore a flowered apron. It was dusted to the elbows with flour. In her left hand she held a book, open, face down, with one finger keeping the place, and in the pocket of the apron, protruding at a perilous angle, was a sandwich. She was not looking at the mittens. She had, evidently, seen them. She was looking at Alan.

He stood still.

It was not a thing that he had been prepared for. He had been prepared for a great many things, in the coach, in the dark, in the long gray hours between the inn and the next inn, and he had gone over them all, in order. A stern woman. A suspicious one. A cold, dry, genteel woman with an eyeglass. He had not prepared for a short plump person with flour on her chin and a sandwich in her apron, who looked at him as though she were reading a very small, very closely printed page.

He counted.

He could not help it. He had been told. One, he thought, and the sharp brown eyes went over his hat, and the horse-hair, and the puddle color, and rested there a moment. Two. They traveled down the green scarf, mended at the end. Three. They took in the satchel, and the boots, and the long dark coat, and the hand in her daughter's. Four. They came back to his face.

"Hm," said Mrs. Joy.

That was all.

He had no idea what it meant. He stood on the step of the porch with his hand in Elen's and the whole of his heart in his boots and watched the small round woman close her book on her finger, and tilt her head, and consider him as a baker considers a loaf that has not yet been turned out. The silence went on. A hen clucked somewhere. A long way off, at the far end of the garden, there came a thin enthusiastic cry that appeared to originate from inside a cowshed.

"You're tall," said Mrs. Joy.

"Yes, madam."

"She said you were tall. I thought she was exaggerating."

"He's exactly as tall as I said," said Elen.

"He's taller." The brown eyes did not leave his face. "And you're wearing my daughter's hat."

"I am."

"It's an awful hat."

"It is," said Alan. He did not look away. "It is also warm."

Something happened in the lined brown face. It was very small. It was a slight movement at the corner of the mouth, there and gone, like a bird across a window. The sharp eyes went down to the scarf at his throat, and she said, in a tone of faint exasperation, "And that's my wool."

"Madam?"

"The scarf. I spun it. It's the Joy green, it's from the black sheep that Ethan lost in the bog. I'd know it anywhere." She put out a floury finger and touched the end, where there was a darn. "And that's Elen's mending. It's dreadful. She does it with her tongue out."

"It is the only part that has never come undone," said Alan.

There was a pause.

Mrs. Joy looked at him for a good deal longer than four seconds. Then she shifted the book from one hand to the other, wiped her fingers on her apron, and stood back from the door.

"Come in," said Mrs. Joy. "You'll want soup."

The kitchen was the warmest room that he had ever stood in.

It was long and low, with a flagged floor and a black beam across the ceiling hung with bunches of dried herbs, and there was a range along one wall the size of a small locomotive, giving out heat in a steady comfortable roar. A great scrubbed table ran down the middle. It was covered in things. There was a loaf as big as a cartwheel, and a basket of eggs, and a stack of what he took at first to be dinner plates and found to be an atlas, and a half-skinned rabbit, and a cat. There were books on the dresser. There were books on the window-seat, and on the stairs that went up in the corner, a book on every step, going up in a spiral into the dark like a staircase made of paper. A stuffed owl on the mantelpiece wore a pair of spectacles. A very old brindled dog lay in front of the range and did not so much as lift an ear.

"Sit," said Mrs. Joy. "Not there, that's Ethan's. Not that one either, it's got the cat. There."

He sat.

He sat in a rush-bottomed chair at the end of the table, with his satchel on his knees, and found that his hands were quite steady. He took out the pot, the seedling in its handkerchief, and put it on the cloth in front of her. He took out the paper twist, and the brass bookmark, and set them beside it, in a row.

"Madam," said Alan. "I have been asked to convey the respects of Professor Marlow, of the Academy, who sends you a marigold. It is, he says, a hardy variety. He says it will grow in any soil, and that it has, on the whole, no opinion. The tea is from a Mrs. Tansy of the Voices market. She says that it is for you, and not for anyone else, and that you will know why." He drew a breath. "The third is of my own making. It is not good. I am told that it is the thought that is meant to count. I should like to say that I have thought a great deal."

Mrs. Joy did not say anything.

She picked up the pot. She held it in both floury hands and bent her gray-streaked head over it and smelled it, long, with her eyes shut, and the small round brown face went quiet. The lined mouth moved. It might have been a smile, and it might have been something else. She put her thumb, very gently, on a leaf.

"Ambrose Marlow," said Mrs. Joy. "I had a letter from him in January. Four lines. It said that my daughter had a gift and that he was afraid that he had not looked after it well enough." She opened her eyes. "I wrote back and told him that if he had been looking after it any better, she'd have blown up the county."

"He did not mention that."

"He wouldn't. He's a gentleman." She put down the pot, quite tenderly, on the sill by the window where the sun came in, and turned. She picked up the brass bookmark. She turned it over. It was bent a little to the left. "Who taught you to do this?"

"Nobody. I was observed by a Mr. Tobias Valemont, my great-uncle, who stood in the door of a forge for an hour and said nothing. At the end of it he said that it would do."

"Did it?"

"It did not," said Alan. "But it was the first time that he had spoken to me in ten years."

Mrs. Joy opened her book. She laid the bookmark between the pages, and closed it, with a small firm click, and put the book on the dresser. She looked at him a moment, with her head on one side. Then she took the kettle from the range, and set it on the table, and said, in the tone of a person reading out a single entry from a long list:

"Do you take sugar?"

He had not expected it.

He had been braced, for three days, for a number of things. He had gone over a catalogue of questions, in the coach, in the dark. Intentions. Prospects. The standing of one's family. Not once had it been put to him in the form of a bowl.

"Two, madam," said Alan. "If it is not an inconvenience."

There was a silence in the kitchen.

It was broken by a sound from the doorway, a high strangled whimper, as of a kettle about to boil, and he turned his head. Elen was standing against the frame with both hands pressed over her mouth. Her eyes were swimming. Beside her, on the threshold, with a smudge of cowshed on his nose and a sprig of hay in his hair, Mr. Hugo Joy had arrived at last, in time to hear it, and had his head thrown back and his spectacles falling off.

"If it is not an inconvenience," wheezed Elen. "To a sugar bowl."

"Marian!" cried Mr. Joy. "Did you hear? He said it to the sugar!"

"I heard," said Mrs. Joy.

She was laughing. She had put both hands on the table and bent over them, her shoulders shaking, and a lock of hair with a pencil in it had come down across her face. "Oh, my dear," she said. "Oh, my dear boy." She wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron and left a streak of flour. "It's a bowl. It hasn't any feelings. You can take as many as you want. It's going to be a very long evening."

"I shall take two," said Alan, stiffly.

"He'll take two," said Mrs. Joy, to the ceiling. "Hugo. Get the good cups."

They ate at seven.

It was the loudest meal that he had ever sat through. He understood, in the first five minutes, that he had been wrong about everything. He had imagined, in the coach, a table. A long polished one, with a white cloth. Two persons at either end, and a certain quiet, and a clock. There were seven at the Joys'. There was Mr. Joy at the head, with his napkin tucked into his collar and a map of the parish spread under his plate, and Mrs. Joy at the foot with a book propped against the jug and a ladle in her hand, and Ethan, enormous, on Alan's left, with his elbows in the butter. There was Elen on his right. There was an aunt, who had arrived without warning from the next village, a gaunt silent woman in black with a long nose and a very large appetite, who was introduced as Great-Aunt Prue and said not one word the whole evening and ate four helpings of everything. And there was the cat. It sat on the table.

"The Sedge," said Mr. Joy, pointing his fork, "rises at the Hob."

"It rises at the Marsh," said Ethan.

"It does nothing of the kind. It has been established by three independent surveys that it rises at the Hob."

"By you."

"By me, and by a man called Pettifer. He was a most reliable fellow. He fell off a cliff."

"Was that before or after the survey?"

"He was in the act of taking a reading," said Mr. Joy, with dignity. "He was a martyr to the science of hydrography."

"Potatoes," said Mrs. Joy, without raising her eyes from her book, and a dish was passed.

Alan sat and watched it.

He had never seen anything like it. They talked all together. They did not wait. A sentence was begun by one, and taken out of its mouth by another, and finished by a third, and the whole thing went round the table like a ball in a game with no rules, and everyone seemed to be perfectly content. They did not appear to mind. Nobody said, may I finish. Nobody said, if I might. A pea went across the cloth, in a flash of green, and struck the owl on the mantelpiece, and was not remarked on. His own mouth, he found, had opened twice, and shut again, each time, as the gap that he had been waiting for filled up with somebody else's remark. He was quite certain that he had a thing to say. He could not find a place to put it down.

"At this table," said Mrs. Joy, from the other end, in the same level, unconcerned voice, to the jug, "you may interrupt anyone. Except the person with the gravy."

He looked up.

She was not looking at him. She was turning a page. But one sharp brown eye had come round, a very little, over the top of the book, and rested on him with an expression of the most careful and complete neutrality.

"Who has the gravy?" said Alan.

"Nobody," said Mrs. Joy. "At the moment."

He felt something touch his ankle.

It was quite gentle. It was a small determined kick, delivered under the cloth by a boot that he knew, from the angle, to belong to a person on his right who was gazing at her plate with an expression of angelic vacancy. It came once. It came again. It said, quite distinctly, in the old language of the Annex: go on.

"Excuse me," said Alan.

It was not loud. Nobody heard it. He drew a breath, and tried again, and heard his own voice go out across the table in the clear flat tone that he used in a hall, so that Mr. Joy's fork stopped halfway to his mouth and Ethan, mid-sentence, shut his own.

"Excuse me. Sir. I believe that the Sedge does not rise at the Hob."

There was a silence.

"I beg your pardon?" said Mr. Joy.

"Nor at the Marsh," said Alan. He found that his hands had gone quite steady. "I have seen the survey of the Board of Roads. It is in the Academy library, in the Reference, in the third bay. It was done in the year of the Great Comet, by a Mr. Alder, with a chain. He records that the Sedge has two heads. The Hob is the western, and the Marsh the eastern, and they are three-quarters of a mile apart, and they join at a place that he calls, I believe, Tinker's Elbow." He drew breath. "It is therefore neither. It is both. You have each been correct, in half."

Nobody moved. The cat, on the cloth, put out a tentative paw toward the butter, and withdrew it.

"Two heads," said Mr. Joy, very slowly.

"Yes, sir."

"At Tinker's Elbow."

"I should say that it is in the Gazetteer. At the foot of a page. In a note."

Mr. Joy put down his fork.

He took off his spectacles. He wiped them, quite deliberately, on his napkin, and put them on again, and a most extraordinary expression spread over his long brown crumpled face. It began at the corners of the eyes. It went up through the forehead and down to the chin, and it was a thing that Alan had seen once, on a dark afternoon, on the face of a girl with a pewter frog. It was pure unclouded joy.

"Marian," said Mr. Joy, in a whisper. "He's corrected me about a river."

"I heard."

"He's read the footnote."

"I heard," said Mrs. Joy. Her book had gone down. Both her brown hands lay quite still on the cloth, and she was looking at Alan with a face from which every particle of neutrality had gone, and in its place was something which he could not have named, and which went into him as a warm weight goes into a cold place. "Hugo. Don't cry in the gravy."

"Two heads," said Mr. Joy, thickly. "Two. In thirty years. Nobody, nobody has ever, they all just say, oh Hugo, it's the Hob." He seized Alan's hand across the table, with an astonishing and entirely sincere violence, and shook it. "My dear boy. My dear, dear boy. You'll have to see the maps."

"He is going to see the maps," said Ethan, with deep contentment. "All of them. In the morning. You've started something."

"I did not wish to give offense," said Alan.

"Offense!" cried Mr. Joy. "Good heavens. It is the most enormous compliment." He wiped his eyes on his napkin. "Nobody has told me I was wrong since the Pettifer business. I've been dying to be corrected. I'd forgotten what it was like."

"They like it," said Elen.

She had not looked up. She was cutting a potato, with her head bent and her ears very pink and her mouth doing something at the corner that she was evidently trying hard not to let it do. But her ankle was against his, under the cloth, and it did not move away.

"It's a, in our house it's a game. You find the error. You say so. Everyone cheers." She did lift her head, then, and her eyes in the lamplight were enormous and bright and quite open. "It's not, it doesn't hurt. Nobody minds. It's the thing we like best."

He sat very still.

He understood it. He understood it quite suddenly, in the warm noise, with a pea on the table and a cat at his elbow and a long lean man holding his hand in both of his across a dish of potatoes with tears of happiness running down his nose. It was the thing that he had been looking for, in a tower, in a library, in the cold dry corridor of a Reading Room. It was the other half of the law. He had thought that to be right was to wound. He had learned it in a house where a correction was a blow, and a thing was said exactly because it was true, and it had never once crossed his mind that a person could be told that he was mistaken, and be glad.

"I should like," said Alan, and his voice was not quite steady, "to see the maps."

"There's one of the Wending Beck," said Mr. Joy. "It's got a mistake in it. I've been saving it."

Ethan took him up to bed at eleven.

It was a long way. The house went on, and on, along passages that dipped and turned and went up three steps and down two, past doors that stood ajar on rooms full of books, and the lantern in Ethan's fist threw their two shadows in great heaving shapes across the plaster. They came at last to a little door at the end of a gallery. It opened on an attic. It was a long low room under the thatch, with a bed at one end and a window at the other, and it was lined from floor to rafters with shelves, and every shelf was full. It smelled of paper and dust and beeswax.

"The annex," said Ethan. "It's the guest room. It's mostly for the Gazetteer. There's a bit of floor." He put the lantern on the table and stood, with his hands thrust in his pockets, looking at the floor. He was a great deal less of a boy than he had been on the gate. "I'll say this and then I'll be a bit of an idiot and go to bed."

"I am listening."

"I'm going to be awful to you." He said it quite gravely. "It's what I'm for. I'm her brother. It's my one real function. I'll tease you till you're sick of it, and I'll do an impression of you at breakfast, and when you come to stay I'll put a frog in your bed. It's a sign." He scuffed at the boards. "It's love, that's all. It's the only way I know how."

"I understand."

"And I'll say one other thing." The big freckled face came up. It was not at all comic. It was white and quite steady, and the hazel eyes were hard. "If you hurt her, I'll be extremely sorry for you."

"I should be sorrier," said Alan.

"I mean it."

"So do I." He met the eyes. He did not look away. "I have hurt her once. In a tower, with a sentence. I did it in the kindest voice that I possessed. I have learned since that it makes no difference. I would sooner be struck than do it again." He drew a breath. "I have a word for it. I cannot say that it will work. But I mean to try, every day, for the rest of what I have."

Ethan looked at him for a long moment.

"Right," he said, hoarsely. He cleared his throat. He stuck out his hand again, and Alan took it, and it was not now a spade, but only a large warm shaking hand. "Right. That's all. Say turnip."

"Turnip."

Ethan Joy gave a great whoop, and clapped a hand over his mouth, and backed out of the room, shaking, with his eyes streaming, and pulled the door to behind him. Alan heard him go along the gallery. He heard, a long way off, a muffled bellow, and a thump, and a remote and distant voice calling to the house at large, "He did it again!" And then it was silent.

He stood alone in the attic.

He was a good deal tired. He took off the hat, and laid it on the table. He unwound the scarf. He sat on the edge of the bed, which sagged, in the lantern light, and looked at the books going up into the dark of the thatch, and thought that he had not in his life been in a house where it was permissible to say that a river had two heads. It was a very small thing. It had gone into him, he found, like a stone into a pond, and the rings were still going out.

He lay down. He did not sleep.

He lay on his back with his arms behind his head and heard the old house settle round him: the tick of the beams, the long sigh of the thatch, a cat going along the roof on an errand of its own. He heard, a long way off, the clock in the kitchen strike twelve, and one. He thought of a map with a pond on it. He thought of a nail. And a little after one, he found that he was quite thirsty, and quite wide awake, and he rose, and took the lantern, and went down the long dark gallery in his stockinged feet.

The kitchen was dim.

The range had been banked, and glowed a soft deep red through its bars, and by it, at the end of the long table, with a single lamp turned low at her elbow and a shawl over her nightgown and her gray-streaked hair down her back in one long plait, sat Mrs. Joy. She had no book. She was not reading. She sat with her chin in her hand and her elbow on the cloth, looking down the length of the dark passage to the front hall, where, through the half-open door, in the gleam of the lamp, a rusty nail glimmered by a porch, and two small red mittens hung side by side.

She did not turn her head.

He stood in the doorway. He did not know what to do with the lantern. He had thought, for one confused moment, of going quietly back, and he had even taken a step, when the dry floury voice said, without any particular emphasis, to the dark:

"Mr. Valemont."

"Madam."

"Sit down."

He stood quite still.

"I have questions," said Mrs. Joy.

He looked at the chair. It was the one at the end of the table, a rush-bottomed thing, opposite her, under the lamp, and it had been drawn out. It had been drawn out, he saw, a little before he came in, and set squarely, with its back to the dark, as a chair is set for a person who has been expected for some time.

He had not prepared a form.

He had not the faintest idea what she would ask. He had, for the first time in all his life, nothing whatever in order, no clause, no heading, no argument. He stood in the red dusk of a strange kitchen in his stockinged feet with a lantern in his hand, and there rose in him, quite quietly, from the very bottom, something that he did not at first recognize, and then did.

He was not afraid.

He put the lantern on the dresser. He crossed the flagged floor. He drew out the chair, and sat in it, with his hands folded on the cloth, and looked at Elen's mother across the little circle of the lamp.

"Madam," said Alan. "I am at your disposal."