"Well, they always were pretty much the same thing," she pointed out. "Once the Unified Field Theorem merged the five basic forces, including magic-"

"I think I've been spending too much time in the wilderness!"

"The wilderness is nice too," she said. "We mustn't sacrifice the old values for the new."

He glanced at her with fresh appreciation. "You like the wilderness?" He remembered Gawain's remark about her affinity for animals.

"Oh, yes! The estate has a section of the park; I go there often. Somehow it seems less lonely than the city."

What a delight she was! But still he wasn't sure. He was not able to view people with a magic glow. "Let's do this puzzle," he suggested. "The park picture."

Orlene smiled with glad acquiescence. "Let's!"

And that finessed the main issue nicely. She did want him to stay, for otherwise she would not have agreed to get into a project like this that could take days. And-he did want to stay. Not necessarily to honor the ghost's request, but to explore the possibility. The notion of helping Gawain in this fashion no longer seemed so unreasonable.

They labored on the puzzle, first sorting the colors of the park scene, then aligning the straight-edge pieces, getting the border done. Norton was an old hand at this sort of thing, except that his experience had been with the old-fashioned kind of jigsaw. This magic-picture variety was new, but the fundamental principles of strategy and matching remained. A picture was like a story, with rules of structure that were vulnerable to exploitation in a case like this.

Orlene turned out to have a good eye for color and shape and was able to locate pieces he needed. She was assisted by her magic, she said; the particular piece she looked for tended to glow. He saw no such effect, but her accuracy in drawing pieces from the great mixed pile lent credence to the claim. The two of them were working well together.

Norton glanced at the clock and discovered that three hours had flown by. They had completed the border and much of the forest path and were working on two trees, but there was a long way to go. Edges and paths filled in deceptively rapidly; the solid masses of single-color regions would be much slower. "Maybe we'd better let it rest for the night," he said.

"Yes. Let me get you some pajamas." They both understood that he would be staying here indefinitely. The agreement had formed, unvoiced, as the outline of the puzzle took form. Like the puzzle, the details remained inchoate.

Norton did not ordinarily use pajamas, but he didn't argue. He was a guest of this estate, and it was no place to flop in his clothes. Except-"Pajamas? Do you have male clothing here?"

"They were Gawain's," she said delicately. "You're close enough to his size, and I'm sure he would have wanted them to be used."