He tried not to look at her when he climbed down from the chair, but again and again he found himself watching. She was unwinding a long sash that had gone around her neck, criss-crossed at her breasts, and circled her waist several times. The sash was violet, almost the color of her eyes. Her hair was a pale brown. He remembered that during the summer it had been blond. There were freckles across her nose, on her arms.

She finished with the sash and now lifted her tunic, and with one motion took it off. Suddenly Mark's fingers seemed to come to life and without his willing it they began to pull off his tunic.

Later she said she had to go, and he said not yet, and they dozed with his arms tight about her. When she again said she had to go, he woke up completely. "Not yet," he said. When he woke the second time it was daylight and she was pulling on her tunic.

"You have to come back," Mark said. "Tonight, after dinner. Will you?"

"All right."

"Promise. You won't forget?"

"I won't forget. I promise."

He watched her wind the sash, and when she was gone he reached out and yanked the cover from the window and looked for her. He didn't see her; she must have gone through the building, out the other end. He rolled over and fell asleep again.

And now, Mark thought, he was happy. The nightmares were gone, the sudden flashes of terror that he couldn't explain stopped sweeping over him. The mysteries had been answered, and he knew what the books meant when the authors spoke of finding happiness, as if it were a thing that perseverance would lead one to. He examined the world with new eyes, and everything he saw was beautiful and good.

During the day while studying, he would stop, think with terrible fear that she was gone, lost, had fallen into the river, something. He would drop what he was doing and race from building to building searching for her, not to speak to her, just to see her, to know she was all right. He might find her in the cafeteria with her sisters at such times, and from a distance he would count them and then search for the one with the special something that separated her from all others.

Every night she came to him, and she taught him what she had been taught by her sisters, by the other men, and his joy intensified until he wondered how the others had stood it before him, how he could stand it.