Rachaela did not ask about the money. The Scarabae could command funds, certainly she had seen that by now. The story was as much a fairy tale as the other, the story of the flight by night over the snow. Both probably were true.

"The lipstick compares favorably with the cherries," said Camillo.

"Yes."

"And I met Lou and Tray at a concert. Not Prokofiev, of course. A gig. They attached themselves to me like pretty flowers to a gnarled old branch. They think I'm some fallen star. And do I sleep with them? What does Rachaela suppose?"

"You like to ride things," Rachaela said, bleakly, "why not Lou and Tray?"

"Superb," said Camillo. "Now you can go away."

"I'm thinking of it," she said, slowly.

"Your former plaint, that you would leave us all. That you would take the nasty Ruth and vanish."

"Ruth has vanished."

"Like a demon," said Camillo. "Gone, yet not exorcised."

"Do you believe," Rachaela said, "that she—"

"No, I won't talk about Ruth, either. Or even about you. When I learned that I wasn't the last, that they were here, in this house, I came back to them. Scarabae. We always come back, even if we have gone away. Let that be a lesson to you."

Lou and Tray were sunbathing on the terrace, while the gray woman stood over them with her basket.

In the drawing room, the Scarabae had finished with the news and were watching an action film. A man hung from an American building one hundred floors up. But did not fall.

There was never a hint of restraint now. It was easy to come and go.

Rachaela left the house.

The day was hot, with a pale dusty sky like India.

She walked down past the great houses with their timbered fronts and bay windows and triple garages, and wide green lawns, down through the semidetached villas where there were children playing noisily in gardens, and cars filling the air with the smell of burned macaroons.

In the London village there were cake shops and boutiques, a florist's, and a hair salon, Lucrece, to which presumably the gemini of Lou and Tray had come.

Rachaela moved along the pavement, which was full of a glitter like chips of diamond. The cars snarled by and the people swung past, their hot flesh and summer clothes, polished dogs with strawberry tongues, and kids on bicycles.

How much longer would she want to be out by day? (That had been her name once, Day.) How long before she kept indoors, behind the syrupy-colored windows, whose stained lights seemed sunk into the furniture so far that, even if the windows should be blasted out, the colors must remain?

And that policeman on the corner, what would he know to do, or not to do, if she went to him and said, / am a Scarabae?