They wore long heavy wool coats over their dresses to protect them from the cool damp air of New Chusan's high central plateau. They seemed to be making their way toward an expanse of broken ground some half-mile distant, separated from the great house's formal gardens by a gray stone wall splashed with bits of lime green and lavender where moss and lichen had taken hold. The terrain beyond the wall was a muted hazel color, like a bolt of Harris tweed that has tumbled from the back of a wagon and come undone, though the incipient blooming of the heather had flung a pale violet mist across it, nearly transparent but startlingly vivid in those places where the observer's line of sight grazed the natural slope of the terrain-if the word natural could properly be applied to any feature of this island.

Otherwise as light and free as birds, the girls were each weighed down by a small burden that seemed incongruous in the present setting, for the efforts of the adults to persuade them to leave their books behind had, as ever, been unavailing.

One of the observers had eyes only for the little girl with long flamecolored hair. Her connexion to that child was suggested by her auburn hair and eyebrows. She was dressed in a hand-sewn frock of woven cotton, whose crispness betrayed its recent provenance in a milliner's atelier in Dovetail. If the gathering had included more veterans of that elongated state of low-intensity warfare known as Society, this observation would have been keenly made by those soi-disant sentries who stood upon the battlements, keeping vigil against bounders who would struggle their way up the vast glacis separating wage slaves from Equity Participants. It would have been duly noted and set forth in the oral tradition that Gwendolyn Hackworth, though attractive, hard-waisted, and poised, lacked the confidence to visit Lord Finkle-McGraw's house in anything other than a new dress made for the occasion.

The gray light suffusing the drawing room through its high windows was as gentle as mist. As Mrs. Hackworth stood enveloped in that light, sipping beige tea from a cup of translucent bone china, her face let down its guard and betrayed some evidence of her true state of mind. Her host, Lord Finkle-McGraw, thought that she looked drawn and troubled, though her vivacious comportment during the first hour of their interview had led him to suppose otherwise.

Sensing that his gaze had lingered on her face for longer than was strictly proper, he looked to the three little girls ambling across the garden. One of the girls had raven hair that betrayed her partly Korean heritage; but having established her whereabouts as a sort of reference point, he shifted his attention to the third girl, whose hair was about halfway through a natural and gradual transition from blond to brown. This girl was the tallest of the three, though all were of about the same age; and though she participated freely in all of their lighthearted games, she rarely initiated them and, when left to her own devices, tended toward a grave mien that made her seem years older than her playmates. As the Equity Lord watched the trio's progress, he sensed that even the style of her movement was different from the others'; she was lithe and carefully balanced, while they bounded unpredictably like rubber balls on rough-hewn stone.

The difference was (as he realized, watching them more keenly) that Nell always knew where she was going. Elizabeth and Fiona never did. This was a question not of native intelligence (Miss Matheson's tests and observations proved that much) but of emotional stance. Something in the girl's past had taught her, most forcefully, the importance of thinking things through.

"I ask you for a prediction, Mrs. Hackworth. Which one shall reach the moor first?"

At the sound of his voice, Mrs. Hackworth recomposed her face. "This sounds like a letter to the etiquette columnist of the Times. If I try to flatter you by guessing that it will be your granddaughter, am I implicitly accusing her of impulsiveness?"

The Equity Lord smiled tolerantly. "Let us set aside etiquette— a social convention not relevant to this enquiry-and be scientific."

"Ah. If only my John were here."

He is here, Lord Finkle-McGraw thought, in each one of thosebooks. But he didn't say it. "Very well, I will expose myself to the risk of humiliation by predicting that Elizabeth reaches the wall first; that Nell finds the secret way through; but that your daughter is the first one to venture through it."

"I'm sure you could never be humiliated in my presence, Your Grace," Mrs. Hackworth said. It was something she had to say, and he did not really hear it.

They turned back to the windows. When the girls had reached to within a stone's throw of the wall, they began to move toward it more purposefully. Elizabeth broke free from the group, ran forward, and was the first to touch the cool stones, followed a few paces later by Fiona. Nell was far behind, not having altered her steady stride.

"Elizabeth is a Duke's granddaughter, accustomed to having her way, and has no natural reticence; she surges to the fore and claims the goal as her birthright," Finkle-McGraw explained. "But she has not really thought about what she is doing."

Elizabeth and Fiona both had their hands on the wall now, as if it were Home in a game of tag. But Nell had stopped and was turning her head from side to side, surveying the length of the wall as it clambered and tumbled over the increasingly rough shape of the land. After some time she held out one hand, pointing at a section of the wall a short distance away, and began to move toward it.

"Nell stands above the fray and thinks," Finkle-McGraw said.

"To the other girls, the wall is a decorative feature, no? A pretty thing to run to and explore. But not to Nell. Nell knows what a wall is. It is a knowledge that went into her early, knowledge she doesn't have to think about. Nell is more interested in gates than in walls. Secret hidden gates are particularly interesting."

Fiona and Elizabeth moved uncertainly, trailing their tiny pink hands across the damp stone, unable to see where Nell was leading them. Nell strode across the grass until she had reached a small declivity. She almost disappeared into it as she clambered down toward the foundation of the wall.

"An opening for drainage," Finkle-McGraw explained. "Please do not be concerned. I happened to ride that way this morning. The current is only ankle-deep, and the diameter of the culvert just right for eight-yearold girls. The passage is several meters long-more promising than threatening, I should hope."

Fiona and Elizabeth moved cautiously, startled by Nell's discovery. All three of the girls disappeared into the cleft. A few moments later, a blaze of fiery red could be descried bouncing rapidly across the moor beyond the wall. Fiona clambered up a small outcropping of rocks that marked the beginning of the moor, and beckoned excitedly to her companions.

"The secret passage is found by Nell, but she is cautious and patient. Elizabeth is taken aback by her early impulsiveness-she feels foolish and perhaps even a bit sullen. Fiona-"

"Fiona sees a magical gateway to an enchanted kingdom, no doubt," Mrs. Hackworth said, "and even now is crestfallen to find that you have not stocked the premises with unicorns and dragons. She would not hesitate for a moment to fly down that tunnel. This world is not where my Fiona wants to live, Your Grace. She wants another world, where magic is everywhere, and stories come to life, and ..."

Her voice trailed away, and she cleared her throat uncomfortably. Lord Finkle-McGraw glanced at her and saw pain in her face, quickly masked. He understood the rest of her sentence without hearing it: . . . and my husband is here with us.

A pair of riders, a man and a woman, trotted up a gravel path that ran along the edge of the gardens, through a pair of wrought-iron gates in the stone wall, which opened for them. The man was Lord Finkle-McGraw's son Colin, the woman was his wife, and they had ridden out onto the moor to keep an eye on their daughter and her two little friends. Seeing that their supervision was no longer required, Lord Finkle-McGraw and Mrs. Hackworth turned away from the window and drew instinctively closer to a fire burning in a stone fireplace the size of a garage.

Mrs. Hackworth sat down in a small rocker, and the Equity Lord chose an old and incongruously battered leather wing chair. A servant poured more tea. Mrs. Hackworth set the saucer and cup in her lap, guarding it with her hands, and collected herself.

"I have been desirous of making certain enquiries regarding my husband's whereabouts and activities, which have been a mystery to me almost since the moment he departed," she said, "and yet I was led to believe, from the very general and guarded statements he made to me, that the nature of those activities is secret, and that, if Your Grace has any knowledge of them-and that you do, is of course merely a convenient supposition on my part-you must treat that knowledge with flawless discretion. It goes without saying, I trust, that I would not use even my feeble powers of persuasion to induce you to violate the trust reposed in you by a higher power."

"Let us take it as a given that both of us will do what is honourable," Finkle-McGraw said with a reassuringly casual smile.

"Thank you. My husband continues to write me letters, every week or so, but they are extremely general, nonspecific, and perfunctory. But in recent months, these letters have become full of strange images and emotions. They are-bizarre. I have begun to fear for my husband's mental stability, and for the prospects of any undertaking that relies upon his good judgment. And while I would not hesitate to tolerate his absence for as long as is necessary for him to carry out his duties, the uncertainty has become most trying for me."

"I am not wholly ignorant of the matter, and I do not think I am violating any trust when I say that you are not the only person who has been surprised by the duration of his absence," Lord Finkle-McGraw said. "Unless I am very much mistaken, those who conceived of his mission never imagined that it would last for so long. It may ease your suffering in some small degree to know that he is not thought to be in danger."

Mrs. Hackworth smiled dutifully, and not for very long.

"Little Fiona seems to handle her father's absence well."

"Oh, but to Fiona, he has never been gone," Mrs. Hackworth said. "It is the book, you see, that ractive book. When John gave it to her, just before he departed, he said that it was magic, and that he would talk to her through it. I know it's nonsense, of course, but she really believes that whenever she opens that book, her father reads her a story and even plays with her in an imaginary world, so that she hasn't really missed him at all. I haven't the heart to tell her that it's nothing more than a computerized media programme."

"I am inclined to believe that, in this case, keeping her in ignorance is a very wise policy," Finkle-McGraw said.

"It has served her well thus far. But as time goes on, she is more and more flighty and less disposed to concentrate on her schoolwork. She lives in a fantasy and is happy there. But when she learns that the fantasy is just that, I fear it will not go well for her."

"She is hardly the first young lady to display signs of a vivid imagination," the Equity Lord said. "Sooner or later they seem to turn out all right."

The three little explorers, and their two adult outriders, returned to the great house shortly. Lord Finkle-McGraw's desolate private moor was as alienated from the tastes of little girls as single malt whiskey, Gothic architecture, muted colors, and Bruckner symphonies. Once they had reached it and found that it was not equipped with pink unicorns, cotton candy vendors, teen idol bands, or fluorescent green water slides, they lost interest and began to gravitate toward the house-which in and of itself was far from Disneyland, but in which a practiced and assertive user like Elizabeth could find a few consolatory nuggets, such as a full-time kitchen staff, trained in (among many other, completely useless skills) the preparation of hot chocolate.

Having come as close to the subject of John Percival Hackworth's disappearance as they dared, and careened past it with no damage except some hot faces and watery eyes, Lord Finkle-McGraw and Mrs. Hackworth had withdrawn, by mutual consent, to cooler subjects. The girls would come inside to drink some hot chocolate, and then it would be time for the guests to repair to the quarters assigned them for the day, where they could freshen up and dress for the main event: dinner.

"I should be pleased to look after the other little girl-Nell— until the dinner hour," Mrs. Hackworth said. "I noticed that the gentleman who brought her round this morning has not returned from the hunt."

The Equity Lord chuckled as he imagined General Moore trying to help a little girl dress for dinner. He was graceful enough to know his limits, and so he was spending the day shooting on the remoter stretches of the estate. "Little Nell has a talent for looking after herself and may not need or wish to accept your most generous offer. But she might enjoy spending the interim with Fiona."

"Forgive me, Your Grace, but I am startled that you would consider leaving a child of her age unattended for most of the afternoon."

"She would not view it in that way, I assure you, for the same reason that little Fiona does not think of her father as ever having left your house."

The expression that passed over Mrs. Hackworth's face as she heard this statement suggested less than perfect comprehension. But before she could explain to her host the error of his ways, they were interrupted by the sound of a shrill and bitter conflict making its way down the hall toward them. The door swung open halfway, and Colin Finkle-McGraw appeared. His face was still ruddy from the wind on the moor, and it bore a forced grin that was not terribly distant from a smirk; though his brow knit up periodically as Elizabeth emitted an especially piercing shriek of anger. In one hand he held a copy of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Behind him, Mrs. Finkle-McGraw could be seen holding Elizabeth by the wrist in a grip that recalled the blacksmith's tongs holding a dangerously hot ingot ready for smiting; and the radiant glow of the little girl's face perfected that analogy. She had bent down so that her face was level with Elizabeth's and was hissing something to her in a low and reproaching tone.

"Sorry, Father," the younger Finkle-McGraw said in a voice slathered with not very convincing synthetic good humor. "Nap time, obviously." He nodded to the other. "Mrs. Hackworth." Then his eyes returned to his father's face and followed the Equity Lord's gaze downward to the book. "She was rude to the servants, Father, and so we have confiscated the book for the rest of the afternoon. It's the only punishment that seems to sink in-we employ it with some frequency."

"Then perhaps it is not sinking in as well as you suppose," Lord Finkle-McGraw said, looking sad and sounding bemused. Colin Finkle-McGraw chose to interpret this remark as a witticism targeted primarily at Elizabeth-but then, parents of small children must perforce have an entirely different sense of irony than unimpaired humankind.

"We can't let her spend her life between the covers of your magical book, Father, It is like a little interactive empire, with Elizabeth the empress, issuing all sorts of perfectly bloodcurdling decrees to her obedient subjects. It's important to bring her back to reality from time to time, so that she can get some perspective."

"Perspective. Very well, I shall look forward to seeing you and Elizabeth, with her new perspective, at dinner."

"Good afternoon, Father. Mrs. Hackworth," the younger man said, and closed the door, a heavy masterpiece of the woodcarver's art and a fairly effective decibel absorbant.

Gwendolyn Hackworth now saw something in Lord Finkle-McGraw's face that made her want to leave the room. After speeding through the obligatory pleasantries, she did. She collected Fiona from the chimneycorner where she was cherishing the dregs of her hot chocolate. Nell was there too, reading her copy of the Primer, and Gwendolyn was startled to see that she had not touched her drink at all.

"What is this?" she exclaimed in what she took to be an appropriately sugary voice. "A little girl who doesn't like hot chocolate?"

Nell was deeply absorbed in her book, and for a moment Gwendolyn thought that her words had gone unheard. But a few beats later it became evident that the child was merely postponing her response until she reached the end of a chapter. Then she raised her eyes slowly from the page of the book. Nell was a reasonably attractive girl in the way that almost all girls are before immoderate tides of hormones start to make different parts of their faces grow out of proportion to others; she had light brown eyes, glowing orange in the light of the fire, with a kind of feral slant to them. Gwendolyn found it difficult to break her gaze; she felt like a captured butterfly staring up through a magnifying lens into the calm, keen eye of the naturalist.

"Chocolate is fine," Nell said. "The question is, do I need it."

There was a rather long pause in the conversation as Gwendolyn groped for something to say. Nell did not seem to be awaiting a response; she had delivered her opinion and was done with it.

"Well," Gwendolyn finally said, "if you should decide that there is anything you do need, please know that I would be happy to assist you."

"Your offer is most kind. I am in your debt, Mrs. Hackworth," Nell said. She said it perfectly, like a princess in a book.

"Very well. Good afternoon," Gwendolyn said. She took Fiona's hand and led her upstairs. Fiona dawdled in a way that was almost perfectly calculated to annoy, and responded to her mother's questions only with nods and shakes of the head, because, as always, her mind was elsewhere. Once they had reached their temporary quarters in the guest wing, Gwendolyn got Fiona settled into bed for a nap, then sat down at an escritoire to work her way through some pending correspondence. But now Mrs. Hackworth found that her own mind was elsewhere, as she pondered these three very strange girls-the three smartest little girls in Miss Matheson's Academy-each with her very strange relationship with her Primer. Her gaze drifted away from the sheets of mediatronic paper scattered about the escritoire, out the window, and across the moor, where a gentle shower had begun to fall. She devoted the better part of an hour to worrying about girls and Primers.

Then she remembered an assertion that her host had made that afternoon, which she had not fully appreciated at the time: These girls weren't any stranger than any other girls, and to blame their behavior on the Primers was to miss the point entirely. Greatly reassured, she took out her silver pen and began to write a letter to her missing husband, who had never seemed so far away.