“I have tutors,” he said. “You know, my mind isn’t quite right. Oh, it’s not that I’m crazy. Nothing like that! Just that my equipment is a little different. That’s what my father says. Like arithmetic. I can’t do it at all. But my father says arithmetic is all made up anyhow. It all depends on what you’re good at making up. I’d like you to see my armies. They’re the best in the world. My father sends to England for the soldiers.”

“Nobody’s mind is quite right,” she said. “I think…”

“You didn’t have to say that to me,” Andrew said kindly. “I don’t require it. I know what I know. I’m useful when we run out of cash. I’m a good driver, superb, my father says. When we move out of here, I get a job driving laundry trucks, just like that!” He snapped his fingers.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Nearly seventeen,” he said. It was shocking—he was so small and bent.

“When you move out of here? Why?”

“When he’s on a movie, we stay. Everybody out here lives on credit, you know. After he gets the money for the movie, he pays up everything, and then we go on credit. But sometimes, when it’s a long stretch between movies, we run out of credit too. Then we move out to a shack on Old Veteran’s Road, and I get a job. No more tutors, no dancing master for my sister.”

Dancing master! Annie visualized a slender Frenchman in evening dress tangoing through a salon. “Does he come here?”

“He used to, before my sister went away to boarding school. Let’s go see my soldiers.”

He took her to a study off the living room. A billiard table took up most of the space. On one wall hung a dartboard. Near the windows was a broad table on which hundreds of toy soldiers were deployed in some kind of order.

“My extras!” said Andrew proudly. Annie was listening to the babble of the artificial brook. “Look!” cried Andrew.

He picked up several of the toy warriors, examined them raptly, then set each one back in exactly the same place. Evidently there was a vast plan located in the depths of Andrew’s not quite right mind.