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caught me on the hop yesterday, but that doesn’t mean I’m feeble.”
    “I never thought you were feeble!” Jonathan protested. He hung about, standing on one foot and then on the other, until Vivian had put the last slice of cheese into her mouth. Then he rushed to the door. “Ready now?”
    Vivian sighed. “No. I have to put my shoes on. And what about my luggage?”
    Jonathan had forgotten about that. “You’d better bring it with you to show that you’ve travelled,” he said. “That gas mask is a wonderfully realistic touch.”
    “It’s not realistic,” said Vivian. “It’s
real
.”
    She found her shoes and packed her suitcase yet again, while Jonathan took his grey flannel disguise and hid it in a stone chest. “They’ll be safe there until Sam can sneak them back to Patrol Costumes,” he said. “Oh, and take that label off the string thing. It’ll look pretty funny if I introduce you as V.S. Lee and you’re waving a label saying V. Smith.”
    This was true, but Vivian felt a twinge of alarm as the label went into the stone chest too. It was as if she really had lost her name. How am I going to prove to Cousin Marty that I’m
me
? she wondered, putting on her school hat and her coat. “Now I
am
ready,” she said.
    The house was huge, with a sort of lived-in richness to it. The rugs along the passages had an ugly, valuable look, but they had worn places on them. The banisters of the many stairs they went down had been polished so much that the carvings on them hadalmost worn away. The stairs had dips in the middle from countless years of feet. People were hard at work putting another layer of polish on them. Jonathan took Vivian on a dodging, zig-zag way down, using four different staircases, so that they never met any of these people face to face, and they came at last to the ground floor. Jonathan let out a sigh of relief. “Now we can let people see us,” he said.
    Vivian looked from the coloured marble patterns on the floor to the wide oak stairway, and then to a row of pointed windows—or maybe doors—on the other side. She could see a sloping town square out there with a fountain in the middle. “What is this house?” she said.
    “The Annuate Palace,” said Jonathan. “This way.”
    He took Vivian along the patterned marble floor to where the space stopped being a front hall and turned into a kind of room full of carved empty frames that were probably chairs. Just beyond an archway, a lady was speaking into what was probably a telephone—though it looked rather as if she was gazing into a mirror and speaking into a magnifying glass. “I’ll be along in five minutes,” she said, glancing at Jonathan and Vivian, “and we’ll sort it out then. Something seems to have come up here. ’Bye.” She put the magnifying glass into a slot by the mirror and turned round, staring at Vivian.
    Vivian suddenly felt truly uncomfortable. This lady had the same deeply anxious look that Mum had worn ever since War was declared. And though she looked nothing like Mum, since she had the same folded eyes as Jonathan with the same flicker in front ofthem, Vivian knew she was a real person with real worries, just like Mum. She might wear yellow and black pyjamas and do her hair in a strange way, but it was not right to lie to her. And here was Jonathan smoothly telling her lies.
    “You’ll never guess, Mother!” he said. “This is Cousin Vivian—Vivian Lee! She’s just got here from Twenty Century.”
    His mother put up a hand and clutched her jetty black hair. “Oh Great Time! Are the Lees back already then? I meant to air Lee House first!”
    “No, she’s on her own. Viv and Inga sent her back because World War Two has just started,” Jonathan explained.
    And here am I standing here letting him lie! Vivian thought uncomfortably. But she had to join in the lying after that, because Jonathan’s mother turned to her with a worried smile. “Of course! That war comes up about a third of the