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the gathering dusk.
    Both men were silent as they drove towards the place where the map makers, confused by the rise and fall of empires, had allowed the boundaries of Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic to converge. A hundred miles to the east was Marek's home. The men would be coming in from the forest now and from the farm, unhitching the great horses from the wagons, and the westering sun would turn the long windows of the ochre house to gold. The storks on Pettovice's roofs fell silent at this time, weary of their domestic clatter, and the snub-nosed little maid would be lighting the candles in the drawing room.
    But it was best not to think of Pettovice, which had once been Pettelsdorf. Marek's home was out of bounds. Czechoslovakia was free still but there was dissent there too, Nazi sympathisers stirring up trouble, and he would not risk harm to those he loved.
    Professor Steiner too was thinking of the past: of his formidable grandfather, the Prussian Freiherr in his doeskin breeches and lynx cape who had turned Jewish pedlars from the gates of his home with a string of curses. That they had plucked von Einigen and his friends from their guards and led them to safety might have amused him: highborn hotheads who had tried to blow up Hitler might have been to his taste.
    Even the man they were hoping to meet today might have passed muster; a former Reichstag councillor, impeccably Aryan, who had spoken out against the Nazis. But what would the old bigot have thought if he'd known that his grandson was plunging into a Bohemian forest on account of a small man with sideburns named Meierwitz? It was Marek's determination to rescue his friend that had made them throw in their lot with the partisans who helped to lead victims of the Nazis across the border. There had been no news yet of Isaac
    Meierwitz, who had escaped from a camp and was in hiding, but till he was out of Germany there would be no safety for Marek, and no rest.
    The old often welcome adventure, having little to lose. But Marek, thought the Professor, had everything to lose. He took the greatest risk, leading the fugitives east along the hidden pilgrim routes he had known since childhood while Steiner waited with the van. And it was wrong. The world needed what Marek had to offer; needed it desperately.
    Yet how could I have stopped him? thought Steiner --and he remembered what Marek's mother had told him once as they walked back from a concert.
    "When Marek was three years old I took him to the sea," she'd said. "He'd never been out of the forest before but friends lent us a villa near Trieste. He just stood there looking at all that water and then he said: "Mama, is that the sea?" And when I said yes he turned to me very seriously and he said: "Mama, I'm going to drink it all up. I'm going to drink up every single drop!""
    Well, he had not done badly in his twenty-nine years, thought Steiner, looking at Marek's face, set and absorbed now that they were coming close to their destination. He had drunk his fill--but what he was doing now was madness. This man more than any he had known had no right to throw away his life.
    Perhaps I'm wrong, thought Steiner. Perhaps he is not what I think he is.
    But he knew he was not wrong.
    By the end of the first week, Ellen had settled into her work. She had begun with her own room, for she wanted the children to feel that they could come to her whenever they wanted, and this had involved her in some creative "borrowing", for by the time she had disposed of the archaeological remains of previous housemothers she was left with bare boards and a bed.
    In refurnishing the room, she called on the help of Margaret Sinclair, the school secretary, to whom she had taken an instant liking. Margaret trotted round the picturesque confusion of Hallendorf in a neat two-piece, lace-up shoes and a crisp white blouse. She had been perfectly happy as a secretary in Sunny Hill School, Brighton, where the girls wore plum-coloured gym