“Except she’s someways timid,” said Margaret. “What hath made her so?”

“Looking on the Lords of the Dead,” said Ellen; which was essentially true. It was her intention to make Margaret respect Laura, and not to take too much time over it.

She had less influence over the fates of the others. She had decided that Ruth should marry Randolph, but she knew better than to interfere. Ruth did not come sighing to her little sister with confidences; she just called herself names. Randolph would have to do something, that was all; and Ellen had had enough of even seeming to make Randolph do anything. As for Patrick, he should go home again. He didn’t belong here. Ted did. So did Ruth and Laura. So did Ellen herself. Their parents wouldn’t like it. Patrick was Mother’s favorite, but her father, however vaguely, was going to miss his daughters. Patrick might miss his sisters, too; but that would serve him right.

Ellen thought over whom she would miss, and scowled. Laura climbed the dusty steps of the North Tower at dusk on a day of cold rain. The door to the uppermost room was open this time. The gold light flooding out of it was kinder than sunshine. Laura stopped in the doorway, regarding the Crystal of Earth. Claudia, who had moved it hither and yon, preventing Patrick from breaking it, preserving it for the Hidden Land, could just as well have broken it herself and had done with it. Laura had read, slowly and painfully, muttering under her breath and applying frequently to Ted for the hard words, Melanie’s account of what she had done with regard to this object.

The little globe Melanie had set here for Patrick to break had not held nothing. It had held their game, the Secret Country of their stubborn and flawed imaginations, the Secret Country into which no Claudia had ever stirred a meddling finger; the shallows to which the Hidden Land was a whole burgeoning ocean. Laura still sometimes thought she preferred the shallows. She had not asked Patrick what he thought; Patrick, who had fought a practice session with Melanie’s sword, and had it taken away from him by an exasperated Fence and a horrified Randolph; and who had, perhaps, as Shan said, had his heart shown to him in such a guise that he wanted to cut it out. And yet he had never shown, in any way except his always being there to play with them, that the Secret Country had a place in his heart at all. He was harder to understand than Melanie. And he was going to be hard to live with, if they had to stay here.

Some things he had figured out. Melanie had expected, when she brought Patrick and his relations into the Hidden Land, to be in almost complete control of them. She had intended to move them to do any of a number of things that would serve the double purpose of making Fence and Randolph unhappy and endangering the Hidden Land. She had also intended to merge them with the dead children, both so that the masquerade should not be discovered and so that it should be, in some measure, the real royal children who had committed whatever crimes she had in mind for them. She had had no control over the real children; she had expected to have more over their dead voices.

But both Shan’s Ring and Melanie’s own sword had awakened the Lords of the Dead, one by one; and while they were awake, however disgruntled, they would notice and retaliate if she tampered more than delicately with anyone in their domain. Melanie had not intended either Shan’s Ring or the sword to have this property of waking the Outside Powers. Patrick could not discover where said property had come from, which was one of the things vexing him.

Another was that all these people and accounts contradicted one another. You might expect Melanie to lie of course; or perhaps just to have a very different idea of what had gone on than Shan had. You might expect the Outside Powers or the unicorns to sidestep the truth, or to have a viewpoint so different that nothing they said would ever make sense. But you would certainly expect the scholars of Heathwill Library to have made something of all these contradictions.

It also bothered him not to know why Melanie had been so far off in her estimation of how much control she would have over them all once she got them into the Hidden Land. Melanie herself seemed to think that the problem was a result of their having found the swords and stumbled in before she was ready for them; which had happened in Patrick’s case because of a dog named Shan, and in Ted and Laura’s because their cousins had been playing a game they loved as much as Ted and Laura loved the Secret Country. Fence and Randolph found these points significant. Patrick found them irritating. It seemed to him more likely that Melanie had failed because he and his relations had been stronger of imagination, or purer of heart, or just stubborner of spirit, than she had thought them. Or she might have been like Aristotle, possessed of a very fine mind and a set of erroneous assumptions about the universe. Maybe her philosophy of magic was as flawed, in its way, as Andrew’s had been.

Andrew vexed Patrick too. He had been so besotted on his so-called sister that he had done anything she asked him to, even when he knew she thought it was magical and therefore should have thought it useless. He had hoped, Melanie thought, to win her from her false philosophies by slow degrees. And she had used this hope. Andrew had thought that he and she and Lady Ruth were engaged in secret negotiations with the Dragon King to bring about a sensible peace, instead of a disastrous magical battle. The details of this plot were not available to Patrick’s questing mind.

He finally sought out Laura, who was the only one of his relations not constantly occupied, and asked her to help him go over his information, in case she knew anything he didn’t.

“Why?” said Laura, sharply for her.

Patrick hesitated. It was irrational. But then, this country was irrational. “I said,” he said, “that I wasn’t going home again until I understood what was going on here. And having said it, I don’t think I can, until I do.”

“Oh?” said Laura. “So you aren’t planning to break the Crystal of Earth any time soon?”

Patrick stared at her. He was not in fact planning to break it at all; but he was not, either, planning to disabuse anybody who had it of the notion that he might be dangerous. “No,” he said. “Not any time soon.”

Laura grinned. “I remember what you said in Australia,” she said. “Princess Laura says, we should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling.”

“Carl Jung said that!” said Patrick, furiously.

“You might think about it anyway,” said Laura.

The King of the Hidden Land received a letter from Lord Andrew. Andrew had stayed behind in the Court of the Dragon King. This, Ted had managed to figure out, counted as the vengeance with which Ted was supposed to reward oath-breaking. And certainly to leave a man who feared magic alone in a court of shape-shifters was punishment enough, whatever Andrew had done or contemplated doing. The letter said nothing of all this, but contained implicitly the assumption that Andrew had been left as a liaison and observer.

Nobody knew what Chryse and Belaparthalion had said to the Dragon King, but he looked far from benign when they finished saying it. Looking thus, he had made to Ted a speech so flowery and convoluted that Ted had not understood a word of it. Fence, consulted during the journey home, said it contained a promise of explicit treaties of peace, and the forwarding of damages for the late war.

Andrew’s letter, opening with brisk formality, detailed the treaties. Ted would have to show them to Fence and Randolph. If they contained innuendos or double meanings, he could not find any. It might be that their language was so plain that it was subject to too many interpretations. It appeared that the Dragon King had agreed to leave the Hidden Land alone except in the case of three particular kinds of provocation, none of which sounded either possible or probable of occurrence, in return for nothing whatsoever. He was also sending north a staggering amount in jewels and gold and fine cloth. Ted wondered uneasily if the shape-shifters of that court could turn themselves into emeralds.

Andrew’s letter contained a postscript. “My lord Edward: My philosophy altereth daily in this place of shadows. My heart is as it was always; wherefore, my liege, I do humbly beg your leave to sojourn here yet a little time. If by my return your grace shall have departed to your other realms, take with you my good wishes for your safety and happiness.”

That was clear enough. He hated it down there, and if he could possibly manage it he was going to stay there until Ted and the others had gone home. If they ever did. And that “If,” of course, was the payment made by the Hidden Land. The Hidden Land had lost its royal children and received in return a motley and reluctant crew bent, if not on abandoning it, at least on making sure they had the means to do so. The Hidden Land had lost its dragon and received a patched-up composite capable of nobody knew what. None of these reverses had profited the Dragon King, but in that coin just the same the Hidden Land was paying for the Dragon King’s friendship. And after all, the Dragon King had gotten an afternoon’s amusement out of it.

Ted felt oppressed. The upper hierarchies of the Secret Country dismayed him. Everywhere you turned there were magical creatures of capricious ability whose power of distinguishing between right and wrong was less developed than a politician’s. Recent events had shown that one was not exactly at their mercy; but one was always having to watch out for them. For the first time, he thought he understood how Patrick felt.

He presented this fact to Patrick later that day, at supper. Patrick heard him out gravely, but all he said was, “Consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

It came to Ted, with a more than minor shock, that he was going to miss Patrick. Not his part in the game; not even his genius for improvisation. Just Patrick. And if he felt like that, how would Patrick feel when he went home—if anybody could ever go home—and all the rest of them stayed?

If all the rest of them were staying. Ted did not know what he was going to do about his parents. He had thought of sending them a letter by Patrick, who was such an unlikely witness to all these events that they might believe him. Patrick’s own parents would probably haul him off to a psychiatrist.

Ted took a savage bite of bread. He would worry about all this when they found the way out. Tomorrow, said Edward, not altogether approvingly, is another day.

He was not in the Council Room, where Ted and Fence had buried the long table in books and grinned vaguely when she poked her head in the door. He was not in his own room, though the door stood open and a yellow dog thumped its tail from the hearth, where the fire was bright and new. He was, inevitably, in Fence’s tower, so that by the time she knocked on the door her courage had leaked away with her breath but she was bolstered by the belief that he was not there, and as soon as he had failed to answer she could be comfortably irate and give up for the day.

“Come in,” his voice called.

Ruth shoved her hair back and pushed the door open. Randolph, in two cloaks and a blue velvet hat and a pair of fingerless gloves, was also immersed in books. He looked up with the expression of pleased inquiry he reserved for Fence; it slid into blankness and then into a pleasant neutrality.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” said Ruth. “But there’s something I can’t remember, and I’d rather ask you than Meredith.”

Randolph put his pen back into the ink bottle and slid his hands into his sleeves. His breath made faint clouds in the air.

“For heaven’s sake!” said Ruth. “You’ve got a splendid fire in your own room for the dog to get spoiled by.” She made for the fireplace.

“It burneth not except by Fence’s command,” said Randolph. “There’s a quilt, if you’re cold.”

“Never mind,” said Ruth.

“What’s the question?”

“Did you promise Meredith we’d be married before the year was out, or before a year was out?”

Randolph grinned. “A year,” he said.

“All right. Now look. What are the choices?”

“To send thee home, can we contrive it,” said Randolph. “To tell all to Meredith and beg her release us from this bond. To marry, and make the best of it.”

“If you send me home,” said Ruth, “I’ll be safe, but as far as Meredith is concerned, you’ll have broken your word.”

Randolph looked blank, and then extremely uneasy. “We might marry first,” he said. “Then send thee home. Thou wouldst be safe, as thou sayest.”

“But I’d be married,” said Ruth. “To somebody I’d never see again. So would you.”

Randolph shrugged. “For me, that makes no matter,” he said. “’Twould keep me from the plague of marriage for policy.”

“And you wouldn’t, you think, when I was gone, ever want to marry anybody for any other reason?”

Randolph was silent. The rain clattered on the windows and the wind thumped the tower like an irate child kicking a locked door. Ruth was cold. The scolding she had given him for sitting here with the fire out replayed itself in the middle of her mind and sounded sillier every time it went by.

“No,” said Randolph. He gestured at Fence’s footstool. “Wilt thou sit down and recover from the staircase?”

Ruth sat, because she felt shaky.

“Now,” said Randolph, “if thou thinkst to marry at home, I’d not prevent it. It was not what Meredith had in her mind when she did extract this promise; but ’tis possible to marry for a term only; for five years, or ten.”

“Five,” said Ruth, “would do me fine, and prevent my enacting some folly in my rash and splenitive youth.”

“Well, then, we’ll do’t so,” said Randolph.

“Not,” said Ruth, “that I have anybody in mind at home.” And that, of course, she ought not to have said. Randolph looked at her with a kind of thoughtful puzzlement.

“Have you not, then?” said Randolph. “And yet you said to the Dragon King that your heart was given already.”

“Isn’t it permissible to lie to one’s enemies?”

“Did you so?”

She had done enough lying to Randolph to last her a lifetime. “No,” said Ruth. “I didn’t lie.”

Randolph pushed back the chair and stood up. Ruth watched him with trepidation. He looked like somebody who was about to do something foolhardy for the sheer joy of it. His face was not happy, precisely, but held rather the beginnings of wildness: Ellen, aged seven, just before she threw her favorite doll into the pond because the thought of Patrick’s face when she took up his dare held more attraction than the doll did. It was not a matter of spite, but the choice of a brief delight over a longer, settled content. Glory over length of days, thought Ruth suddenly, and pressed her hands together, hard.

Randolph walked over to the window and contemplated the darkness. Ruth could hear the little hiss of the torches burning. He was, no doubt, burying his crazy impulse, whatever it was. In the end, she couldn’t stand it and spoke to him.

“What are you looking at?” she said.

Randolph turned and leaned on the window frame. Above his dark head the carved story of Shan gleamed dully. “Faintheartedness,” he said. He walked across the room, and with no particular flourish, knelt on the floor a yard away from where she sat on the stool. “Let’s put this matter on some better footing,” he said. “Ruth. If I should ask thee, wouldst thou marry me?”

Ruth’s breath clogged in her throat. “Faint heart,” she said in a strangled voice, “never won fair lady.”

Randolph smiled. “Wilt thou marry me?” he said.

“So much,” said Ruth, “for the faint heart. Now.”

“The fair lady,” said Randolph, “is here.”

“Wait,” said Ruth. “I’m sure you can make pretty speeches. Don’t do it yet. I’d hate them to go around and around in your head for weeks afterward. Randolph. I would love to marry you. Don’t say anything. I am sixteen years old and I have a brain full of turnips. I don’t know when people marry in this country, but in mine they do it at twenty, or later.” She paused because she was out of breath.

Randolph had not moved. He said gravely, “I’m fond of turnips.”

“Oh, go to!” said Ruth.

“I understand you,” said Randolph. “It may be wise. Four years would settle many matters. We would marry, to fulfill our word; you must then do as you will.”

“I could go to Heathwill Library and study something,” said Ruth.

Randolph said, “An we do find the means to send you home?”

“I was thinking of staying,” said Ruth, “anyway.” There. She had said it. What would Patrick say? She added, “If they’ll have me. I just wish you could meet my parents.”

“So,” said Randolph. “This rubble being cleared, what’s thy answer, lady?”

“I’ll marry you,” said Ruth.

The fireplace bloomed suddenly with yellow light, and warmth flowed over them. “I am sorry I was so long,” said Fence’s mild voice. “Ted and I have found what we sought.”

Ruth and Randolph looked at him. Fence, his arms full of books and a too-large blue cap on his head, peered at them from under it with a gaze as sharp as the Nightmare Grass. He said to Randolph, “She is too young.”

Randolph said, “Four years.”

Fence smiled, and dumped the books on the nearest chest, and looked at them again. Ruth couldn’t have moved, but she thought Randolph’s knees must be getting sore.

“Shall I give you solitude,” said Fence, “or a celebratory glass of wine?”

Ruth looked at Randolph, and her bones turned to water. “Wine,” she said, “an it please you.”

“Were any of us who sought this knowledge,” he said, looking at Patrick, “of an experimental temper, we had had it long since. But we have burrowed this month in Shan’s writings, and Melanie’s, and then asked again for Ted and Laura’s account of how they did arrive here, in the Mirror Room, sans any sword.” He looked at Ted.

Ted said, “Purgos Aipos is an old name for High Castle.”

“Oh, good grief!” said Ruth. “You put your hand on the mirror, and you say, ‘Apsinthion’; and you come out in the stark man’s house.”

“And then,” said Patrick, sourly, “you can just take the first flight to Australia. No problem.”

“Hold a moment,” said Fence. “Patrick; Ellen; Ruth. Hath your house any name?”

They looked at him blankly. Their parents didn’t name things. Ted said, “My father calls it the Coriander Castle.”

“What?” said Ruth.

“Coriander,” said Ted, “stands for hidden merit.”

“He would,” said Patrick. “And it’s going to work too; you know it.”

“When shall we essay this?” said Fence. “Need you a few days’ grace, to find if you will go or stay?”

Nobody answered him. Fence said, “You must know that you are, every one, most heartily welcome to stay.”

“We will lose Patrick,” said Randolph.

“I’m afraid you will,” said Patrick. “I find I prefer the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It doesn’t talk back.”

“What about the civil war?” said Laura. “If Prince Patrick turns up missing?”

“It’s time for truth,” said Fence. “Andrew, mark you, who was to begin this war, is away, and hath had in the interim an education. Fear us not.”

“I don’t think,” said Ellen, “that anybody needs time for cogitation.”

“Wait just a moment,” said Ruth. “Is all this glumness justified? Who says we can do this only once?”

“The Dragon King,” said Fence.

Ted put his head in his hands. The three particular kinds of provocation, impossible of occurrence.

“The use of these mirrors,” said Fence, “as the use of all of the magical artifacts of Melanie, doth awake the Outside Powers. The first use troubleth their sleep; the second maketh them to stir; and the third doth send them roaring.”

Apsinthion had told them that, thought Ted; and they had not understood him.

“So,” said Patrick, “we can all go to Australia, and everybody except me can say good-bye to parents. And then everybody except me can come back. And the Outside Powers will have but stirred in their sleep.”

“One only,” said Fence. “Three uses, to awaken one. But they have been so recently roused, ’twere folly to—”

“But the next time you use those mirrors,” said Patrick, disregarding him, “be it in two years or two hundred, the Outside Powers will emerge roaring. Give me strength. You couldn’t pay me to stay here.”

“I don’t hear anybody offering,” said Ellen, absently.

“There aren’t any magic mirrors in our house,” said Patrick. “How do you propose to get there?”

“There will be,” said Fence. “One magic mirror maketh another, by their property of reflection.”

“Never mind,” said Patrick. “Can we get this over? Can we just go and do it now?”

“Of a certainty,” said Fence, and got up.

The five of them followed him along the drafty passages of High Castle, to the Mirror Room. Fence and Randolph would be coming to Australia with them, to lend what Ellen, or possibly Princess Ellen, called verisimilitude to an otherwise drab and unconvincing narrative. “Not drab,” Patrick had remarked, “but about as unconvincing as you can get. Do you really think a short guy in a wizard’s robe and a tall one got up like Hamlet are going to put any twentieth-century parent’s mind at ease?” Ted thought of this, trailing behind his shorter cousin’s vigorous stride; watching the way Ruth and Randolph walked close together without touching; and the way Ellen stuck next to Laura and talked incessantly at her. If they could see us come out of that mirror, it should help, he thought. He plunged forward and caught up with Patrick.

“Pat? Where is the mirror in your new house?”

“Well, there’s one in the bathroom,” said Patrick, as if he had been expecting the question. “But we wouldn’t most of us fit through it. There’s a full-length one on the back of my parents’ closet door; and a mirrored wall in the dining room. And a full-length one in Ruthie’s room. Take your pick.”

In the Mirror Room, three black cats slept in an untidy heap on Agatha’s sewing table. Ellen scratched them all behind the ears. Fence made for the Conrad tapestry, and twitched it aside.

“Fence?” said Ted. “Can we choose which mirror we come out?”

“Maybe,” said Fence. “You might hold in your mind’s eye the room you think best suited to’t.”

“The dining room, Ruth and Ellen,” said Patrick.

“Join hands,” said Fence. “Now.” He laid his hand on the mirror. “Castle Coriander.”

And he stepped through the mirror, drawing Ruth, Randolph, Patrick, Ted, Laura, and Ellen after him.

The surface of the mirror gave before Ted’s hand like cloth. He stepped through, and the feel of cloth tattered and diminished. He saw a high-ceilinged, handsome room, flooded with early sunlight and furnished with a table and chairs he recognized. It was warm and smelled pleasantly of coffee and pancakes. The table was laid for four. Three of them sat there already: a tall abstracted man with dust-colored hair and a vague face, Ted’s Uncle Alan; a little black-haired man with very blue eyes, his father. Ted’s uncle had not noticed them yet. His aunt, who was sitting directly across the table from the mirrored wall they had walked out of, dropped her knife with a clatter and said, “Mother of God!”

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” said an ironic voice in the doorway; and there, in her old green bathrobe with her long brown hair falling over it in rats’ tails, just like Laura’s, stood their mother, her hands full of mugs and in her face a kind of horrified delight.

Laura ran at her, and she obligingly dropped the mugs, one of which broke, and hugged her daughter. “What are you doing—” she said, and stopped, and put Laura a little away from her. “Honey. You’ve grown too. What is going on here?” She looked over Laura’s quivering head, found Ted unerringly, and grinned at him. Then she stood up. “I see two strangers here,” she said. “Sirs? What does this mean?”

Ruth walked around the table and tapped her father on the shoulder. “Daddy,” she said.

“Awake, are you?” said Ted’s Uncle Alan. “I think there are some pancakes left.”

“Alan, look at the mirror,” said Aunt Kim.

He looked up. “Ted,” he said, in a pleased tone. “And Laura. You didn’t tell me they were coming,” he said to his wife.

“Oh, God!” said Ruth, and burst out laughing.

“Oh, God, exactly,” said Ted’s father. “Teach me to call names. Mary Rose in triplicate, and Thomas the Rhymer in duplicate. And who are the rest of them? They look halfway responsible next to the bunch of you.”

“Mother,” said Ruth, in a shaking voice where laughter almost met tears, “this is Fence, and this is Randolph. This is my mother, Mistress Kimberly Carroll; and my aunt, Mistress Nora, and my father, Master Alan, and my uncle, Master Thomas.”

Ruth’s mother stood up. “Alan,” she said, “I think we need some more chairs.”

“I think,” said Ted’s father, standing up too, “that we need some more coffee.”

“They drink tea,” said Ted.

“They can drink coffee for once,” said his father, eyeing him steadily. “Let them be a little off balance too.” He held out a hand suddenly, and Ted bolted forward and fell on his neck, like a proper prodigal son.

There was a certain amount of sniveling all around, and an appalling amount of talk, and a staggering interrogation under which Fence and Randolph bore up very well. Ted’s parents, he was relieved to see, believed the story, in the end. His aunt did not, but seemed willing, possibly through mere exhaustion, to let them continue to their conclusion. It was hard to tell with his Uncle Alan, who might not consider disbelief a barrier to, or belief a reason for, anybody’s action. So Ruth explained that all of them except Patrick were going back to the Hidden Land; and the yelling started. Ruth and Ellen and Patrick’s side of the family were great yellers.

Very few speeches into it, Ted and Laura’s side of the family plunged precipitately into the living room, dragging a reluctant Fence, shut the door, fell into whatever chairs were nearest, and stared at one another in a worn-out silence.

“Now let’s try again,” said Ted’s mother.

“No, wait,” said Ted. “Fence. Have you got an immigration quota?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Can they come too?” He had not been able to ask it in the other room. His aunt and uncle would never come.

There was another sort of silence. “Why not?” said Fence. He looked cautiously at Ted’s father, who had been calling him a variety of names Ted had never heard before, and at Ted’s mother, who had been steadily disregarding him, and said, “You’d be heartily welcome; heartily.”

“I can’t think why,” said Ted’s mother.

“If these were mine,” said Fence, gently, “I’d fight as hard as this to keep them.”

“Mom,” said Laura. “They all talk like Shakespeare there.”

“Well,” said their mother, on a shaky laugh, “then there’s no more to be said, surely?”

“Oh, Lord,” said their father. “What time is it in Illinois? We’ll have to call Kathy and Jim and tell them—something.”

“Blame it on us,” said Ted. “They’ll believe anything about us.”

“Do you think they’re going to call the police in there?” said Ted’s mother.

“They’ll think of it,” said his father, “and Randolph will point out that all seven of them can simply step back through the mirror before anybody so much as picks up the telephone.”

“Tom,” said their mother, “are we in fact going to do this?”

Ted’s father put his head in his hands. “If we did,” he said. “Power of attorney. Thank God we signed one before we left. We need to sell the house and most of the contents. Kim and Alan should have some of the good stuff. We’ll have to make a list. Now. Why are we doing this?”

Ted’s mother said, in a tone he recognized, “We’ve decided to emigrate. We’re staying with Kim and Alan until we find a house.”

“Postcards,” said Ted’s father. “We’d better write a series and have Kim mail them at intervals—if she will.”

“Patrick will,” said Laura.

“Yes, of course. You two had better write some too. Friends, relations, teachers.”

“Another list,” said their mother. “People you don’t want to have worrying about you. We mustn’t disappear. We must move to Australia and gradually lose touch. Will Patrick mail postcards for a year and a half? It would take that long, really.”

“Patrick will follow a schedule until Armageddon,” said Ted’s father.

“What are we going to do down here to earn money?” said their mother.

“I could help Kim with the farm,” said their father, dubiously.

The rest of the family burst out laughing.

“You’re doing it wrong,” said Ted. “What have you always wanted to do? Tell them you’re doing it.”

“Live where everybody talks like Shakespeare,” said their mother, not laughing at all.

“What’s your second choice?” said Ted.

“Cartography,” said his mother, promptly.

“Does Australia need cartographers?” said her husband.

“The Hidden Land needs them,” said Fence.

They had forgotten about him.

“Well, that’s a relief,” said Ted’s mother. “I don’t imagine being a parasite in a magical kingdom is any pleasanter than being one anywhere else.”

“They’re musicians, Fence,” said Ted.

“That’s well for us. Doth Australia need musicians?”

“Tell ’em you’re taking some courses in computer programming,” said Laura.

“They won’t believe it,” said her father.

“Sure they will. They’ll say, well, finally, he’s fulfilling his potential,” said Laura, rolling the phrase on her tongue with a scorn Ted had not known she was capable of.

There was a great deal more to be said, but it was of a far less awful and enervating nature than what was going on in the next room. Ted was only surprised that somebody or other had not run out in a fit of hysteria or rage or both. But nobody did; and when Ted and Laura and their parents, trailed by Fence, cautiously opened the door and walked back into the dining room, the other half of the Carroll family was quiet, if tear-blotched, and actually looked at them inquiringly. Randolph was the only person present who had not, clearly, been crying; and he looked worse than those who had.

“We’re all going back,” said Ted into the stuffy air. “All four of us.”

“And we are, all two,” said Ruth, foggily.

“I’m staying,” said Ellen, with great clarity.

Her father put out an arm and gathered her in; Ted’s Aunt Kim closed her eyes with her fingers and leaned on the table, saying nothing.

“Somebody,” said Ellen, “has to keep Patrick in line.”

“Mother?” said Ruth, “I’d be going to college in a few years anyway.”

“What you have to do,” said Ellen, her cheerful voice beginning to clog up, “is figure out a way around this idiotic prohibition so everybody can come to the wedding.”

“I don’t see,” said Ted’s Aunt Kim, from under her hand, “that there’s anything we can do or say that we haven’t tried. If you’re going, Ruth, you’re going. You’re too old to be ordered.”

“Ellen,” said Ruth, “don’t do this for me.”

“I’m not,” said Ellen. “I liked it there; but I like it here.”

And that, thought Ted, was perfectly true. Ellen made the best of whatever place received her. He looked at his sister, who was staring at Ellen, stricken.

“Margaret’s nice,” he said to her.

“Margaret’s a demon,” said Laura.

“So is Ellen a demon,” said Ruth. “You’re just used to her.”

“I’m starting to get in your way, Laurie,” said Ellen.

“That’s stupid!” said Laura.

Ellen just looked at her. Ted didn’t think it was stupid. As Laura became less of a mouse, Ellen wouldn’t know what to do with her; Ellen had had eleven years of hauling around her terrified, clumsy cousin. No doubt they would have managed if they had stayed together; but there was no need to say that now.

“What,” said Ruth’s mother, with somewhat more energy, “are we going to tell people?”

“The four of us,” said Ted’s mother, in that same familiar tone, “are emigrating to Australia. Why don’t we settle in Sydney, and take Ruth with us, Kim, because being stuck out in the middle of nowhere doesn’t agree with her?”

“My English teacher’ll worry,” said Ruth, suddenly.

“Write her some postcards,” said Ted’s mother. “Though I don’t know who’s to mail them from Sydney.”

“I will,” said Ellen. “Mom can take me when she goes shopping. I can write some for you too, Ruthie; I can imitate your handwriting.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Ruth, without much force.

“What are you doing about your house?” asked Ruth’s father, who had been hanging about the edges of this discussion with the expression of somebody who likes Bach but has been inveigled into attending a heavy-metal concert. Ted’s parents explained it to him, with relish, adding details as they went along, and finally got him occupied making a list of which of their books he wanted.

“Fence,” said Laura, “doesn’t this add up to an awful lot of lies?”

Both her parents looked around; they knew the force of that argument. Fence quirked the corner of his mouth, and then grinned. “Just this once,” he said, in excellent imitation of Ruth, “call it sorcery.”

There was a silence. Ted counted up the good-byes there were to be said, and was not sure he could manage it.

“Are you in a hurry,” said his Aunt Kim, rubbing her eyes, “or will you stay and eat something with us?”

“Yes,” said Ellen, looking over her father’s encircling arm at Laura with a very private and rather wavery smile, “have some cornflakes before you go.”