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dressing herself, was already beginning the patter by which she encouraged herself and Laura into a quick and occasionally competent morning, not realizing yet that this morning was twisting into a new and anxious form.
    "Come on — eat up, Lolly! Jacko darling, you're going to have to shift your precious bones. It's not Saturday yet. We've got to be off and away. What stamp?" she concluded, as if she were moving in a different time from Laura and the original question had only just reached her ears.
    "He had a stamp on his hand that wouldn't come off," Laura said, and Kate suddenly remembered back to yesterday, striking her forehead with the palm of her hand.
    "That's probably what's caused all these nightmares," she cried. "He was worried about his hand... I thought he must have a mosquito bite on it. Poor Jacko. Never mind! It's over and done with. The old dream's gone. Bright new morning! Look — the bad stamp's rubbed off over night."
    "No way!" Laura declared, staring at Jacko's mute hands, the right one haunted by the faint, purple ghost of Mickey Mouse, and the left hand slightly inflamed perhaps, but innocent of any stamp of any kind. "Listen! Let me tell you what happened."
    "All right, if you must! But be quick!" Kate said.
    However, it was not easy to tell after all. As Laura tried, the story, lively and indignant in her head, twisted itself in her mouth, limping out of her lips, sick and ashamed.
    "I know it sounds mad!" she cried despairingly, thumping the quilt with frustration. "I know you can't believe me."
    Kate rescued the almost empty cup and stared at her in surprise.
    "I'm sure you're partly right," she said. "Laura, I really am sure you're right about what actually happened, but I can't help questioning your interpretation. Come on, Lolly! Warnings one morning, wicked signs the next... it's not like you to come over all superstitious. I thought the stamp looked quite horrid. I thought it looked like some advertising gimmick that had misfired. But if it hasn't rubbed off, then where is it?"
    "I don't know," Laura replied gloomily. "Dissolved, I expect. Dissolved into Jacko's blood."
    "What a thing to say in front of a boy who's had nightmares," Kate exclaimed reproachfully. "Don't let's get carried away. Or rather do let's ... We're seven minutes late already, and empires have risen and fallen on being seven minutes late."
    Later, Laura watched her mother and Jacko drive away. With a sigh she turned into the school gate, looking forward to Nicky's cheerful, gossipy company, sure at least that no matter what the day had to offer it couldn't be as threatening as yesterday. No jaws closed over her, there was no prospect of anything but ordinary school with ordinary, and therefore welcome, boredom. Disturbing ideas pursued her and nothing was reliable and straightforward any more. Sorry Carlisle stood by the flagpole talking to a girl, a sixth former called Carol Bright, someone he was quite entitled to talk to, but Laura thought she detected on his mild face the light of an interest that was more than casual. She stared very hard at him, trying to confirm this, and thought, not for the first time, that he was almost good-looking, and wondered how anyone with eyes full of reflections and dark staircases could enjoy the thought of Carol — except, of course, that she had wonderful, smooth, long, black hair which she wore in many different ways. Today it was in a pony- tail — the tail of a circus pony, a curving fall of dark silk tied with school ribbon, inviting hands to stroke its shining descent. Laura, who had two ways of wearing her hair, long and woolly and short and woolly, now found she could actually be jealous of Carol Bright, and realized that, although she had never spoken to him, except as a fourth former speaks to a prefect and seventh former, in some ways she believed Sorensen Carlisle belonged to her because she knew what he really was and nobody else did. Almost as if in confirmation, he