The journey was not as long, on this occasion, as she had anticipated. The Rolls ran over motorways into the capital, and they were there at sunset.

So she saw the common on a flaming sky the polarized windows could not completely withhold. The trees and sweeps of earth inside the drum of the city, wild land inside a bottle.

She was surprised by the comparative nearness of a road. She stared at them, Eric, Sasha, and Miranda, Michael and Cheta. Below, beyond the houses of rich people (less rich, evidently, than the Scarabae), lay the London village with its shops and supermarket, its library and pubs, and the quills of the churches, and beyond, the smoky back of London. But London was old, too. Remember that.

It was not like the first house at all. Yet it had been made like it. Only the windows were tarot windows instead of puns upon the Bible.

Over the pillared hall were wonderful women in robes, with harps, and rose-red hair. The stairway parted and ran up in two opposing flights, and there the windows had minstrels and flamingo skies.

There was no one to welcome them. The Rolls had driven away. Yet in every room, the machines, the TVs. And in the huge main chamber, white and gold below the stairs, was an ivory telephone.

Rachaela walked boldly to it and picked it up. There was a dialing tone. But who, who, should she call?

Miranda followed her to her room. Miranda made her shy. She had wept with Miranda.

"Look, Rachaela. You'll like it."

The room was the shade of a dove. Soft sweet gray lit with hints of amber. And then the bed and chairs deep green like the pines of the common. And beyond, the white bathroom with its antique finish and viridian window.

But the window in the bedroom, which showed a snowy woman with golden hair and wings, holding up her hands to the doves which had created the room, was not the picture of that other room, the Temptation, with its armor and apples, its Eve, its snake. This was a luminous romantic window, without significance, perhaps. And, it stood open.

"The window—" said Rachaela.

"You can see out over the common," said Miranda.

Sasha had appeared in the doorway.

"You must be careful at night," said Sasha, "of bats."

And this absurdity, these bats of vampire myth, improbable in a London park, made Rachaela laugh aloud, and then Sasha laughed, as once before, and then Miranda. So they all stood laughing.

"Do the colors please you?" asked Miranda.

"It's wonderful, yes."

"Do stay," said Miranda.

As if there had always been free choice.

Of course, actually, there had always been.