Harper let her sword droop slowly to the blacktop. Tired. She was very tired suddenly. Her eyes, her arm, her whole body. Heavy, tired. And frightened, truly terrified. Trembling violently as the reaction set in. She could hear Bernard gasping for breath behind her. She could feel his narrow back leaning against hers. She had to lean against him as well to stay upright.

For an endless moment more, she could still make out the scarred man, retreating. She could see his pink, piggy glare, his pointing finger. An endless moment more.

Then the two of them, she and Bernard, were alone in the darkness.

4

The evening of the auction arrived and—just as Harper had feared—Sophia hanged herself. For her, it was the end of a long, dreamy day.

First thing in the morning, she had burned all her snapshots of her mother. Sitting at home, very businesslike at her escritoire. Dressed in one of the usual uniforms: blue cardigan over white blouse, pleated gray skirt. She glanced sometimes through the balcony doors, out at the gabled roofscape of South Kensington: chimneys and attic windows, a stone church spire against the solid gray sky, sedate and lovely. One after another, in the ashtray at her fingertips, the photos burned. The char closed in a rough circle over those features so like her own.

Sophia felt cool as she watched this happen. Remote and clear in her mind. Having decided what she would do, there seemed to her a very straight line of perfect clarity between her and the doing of it, an open corridor that proceeded through precise, logical and predictable steps towards the image of her own body, dangling. It was the world surrounding this corridor that appeared hazy, veiled, uncertain. It was that misty periphery which gave the day its dreamlike quality.

When she had done with the pictures, she opened the balcony doors and cleared the air, waved the smoke out over the Little Boltons with the back of her hand. Then she walked down the corridqr to the bathroom. Emptied the last load of laundry from the dryer. Folded these clothes in her bedroom, on her bed. Packed them in the suitcase that lay open there. As if she were going on a journey. She felt this would be easier for everyone and would leave less of a mess behind.