“It’s time now? For what?” Lydia asked mentally. Then she thought: Of course. It really was time. Tweety’s clothes were off now. Bianka was rubbing her skin with a towel that had been heated in the oven. The pleasant sensations made Tweety squeal.

“It’s time to forget, just for a while,” Seven said. “Time to give your new self a chance. You’ve helped Tweety all you can for now.”

“Papa’s little darling,” Josef exclaimed, coming nearer, with his big face close to hers; brown moustache bristling.

Lydia felt all life calling. The wood in the stove crackled, it seemed, as no other kindling wood ever had. Josef gave Tweety the bread and jam, and the texture and taste was brand-new in the universe, a sensual wonder. All life and reality suddenly seemed concentrated in that warm immediate kitchen.

Inside herself, Lydia sobbed, with nostalgia for the future and the past.

“I’ll be with you,” Oversoul Seven said. He was a point of light on the windowpane.

Mentally Lydia muttered, “A lot of good that will do. I’ll forget you too, won’t I?”

“She looks like you, Bianka,” Josef’s voice warmly thundered. He stared, grinning, into Tweety’s face.

And Lydia for a moment stared back. She thought that he’d already forgotten that they had chosen to be father and daughter; that …

“How strange she looks sometimes,” Bianka cried, worried.

And Lydia looked out of the child’s eyes, through the unsteamed portion of the kitchen window, seeing the seventeenth-century fields covered with snow; the past come alive, and turning into the present.

“But it isn’t the past, of course,” Oversoul Seven said. “And I’m so proud of you.”

“The time is now, isn’t it?” she said. “I wish there was some way that you could give Tweety some of the knowledge that I’ve picked up along the way. Or the knowledge that you’ve picked up. Like a built-in set of instructions or …” She paused, dizzy. She could feel herself becoming Tweety even more completely. It was difficult to concentrate. “Seven, it will be all right, won’t it?” she called, for Oversoul Seven seemed to be disappearing into a kind of psychological distance, while she, as Tweety, impatiently wiggled as Bianka dressed her in warm clothes.

“It will be fine,” Seven called back. “I promise. And I promise that I’ll give Tweety some kind of ‘instruction book’ for her new life. And what you’ve learned will be a part of her heritage, too.” In his pride in Lydia and his desire to help her, and in his exuberance, Seven shouted, “I’ll think of something terrific.”

Bianka stared. “Tweety looks different now. Look at her.” She wiped her hands on her apron and looked closely into Tweety’s face. “She seems more here!” she cried.

“More where?” Josef laughed. “She’s my girl.”