Peter and Allan, Mitch, Roger and Tony went off together. Susie and Mike left separately. Then Pat was gone, then Jane. They would be back, apparently, in the spring. The children were abandoned, at least one by its parents, but desertion seemed to make no difference.

Ron and Colin, Clare and Chloe remained. And Ruth. Ron and Chloe became close. Ruth slept alone in the "girls' van," at first with the children. But the children were afraid of Ruth, and in the end they went into the Volkswagen with Chloe and Ron.

The remaining travelers overwintered above a village built of gray stone, under rounded, louring hills that eventually were marbled with snow.

The cottage in which they lived was the summer retreat of Ron's elder brother, who perhaps did not know that they were there. Certainly they treated his furnishings with scant care, and used his electricity generously. There was no central heating, but electric fires were in all the rooms, and in the living rooms they burned wood on the open hearth.

They shopped in the village without problems.

The winter was a confinement. They all grew to hate each other deeply. Initially Clare sided with Colin against Ron and Chloe. Then Chloe and Clare banded together. One early morning, when the snow had begun to melt, Ron drove off in the Volkswagen, leaving Chloe's things in a pile on the cottage floor.

Chloe mourned, and in the end Colin went to bed with her. This caused an ultimate estrangement of which, oddly, Ruth was made the scapegoat.

In the spring, they cast Ruth forth. They had found out from her that she had a friend in Cheltenham. They gave her some money to get there.

Ruth was not sorry to go. But as she walked along the village lane toward the highway, she felt a sense of something left undone.

Emma Watt had lived in Cheltenham, with her daughter and her daughter's husband. Ruth recalled perfectly the number of the house, and the road. Emma, physically, she recalled less well. Emma had been Ruth's mother, although not in name—"Mommy" was Rachaela. Emma, however, had brought Ruth up, taught her to read, cooked for her, made her world. And then Emma's daughter had wanted Emma. And Emma left Ruth at once. Ruth had been seven.

Ruth was twelve now. Unmarked, her birthday had gone by just before Christmas, when the travelers had been organizing nut roast and carrot cake to celebrate.

Emma would not recognize Ruth. But Ruth, who had forgotten Emma's face, would know Emma at once.

There was a deep animal excitement about going back. Ruth did not analyze it, was not even entirely aware of it.

But on the journey, as she put on her skimpy skirt under the old raincoat in the station lavatory, Ruth remembered she was Scarabae.